All life worth living is difficult, nobody promised us happiness; it is not a commodity you have earned, or shall ever earn. It is a by-product of brave living, and it never comes in the form we expect, or at the season we hoped for, or as the result of our planning for it.

Katherine Anne Porter

Categorized in : Brave Planning Commodity

The past is never where you think you left it.

Katherine Anne Porter

left past thinking

Trust your happiness and the richness of your life at this moment. It is as true and as much yours as anything else that ever happened to you.

Katherine Anne Porter

richness happened moments

The arts do live continuously, and they live literally by faith; their names and their shapes and their uses and their basic meanings survive unchanged in all that matters through times of interruption, diminishment, neglect; they outlive governments and creeds and the societies, even the very civilization that produced them. They cannot be destroyed altogether because they represent the substance of faith and the only reality. They are what we find again when the ruins are cleared away.

Katherine Anne Porter

government reality art

If we say I love you, it may be received with doubt, for there are times when it is hard to believe. Say I hate you, and the one spoken to believes it instantly, once for all. ... Love must be learned, and learned again and again; there is no end to it. Hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked.

Katherine Anne Porter

hate love-you believe

You shouldn't side-step suffering if you have to go through it to get where you're going.

Katherine Anne Porter

suffering

Perhaps the habit which distinguishes civilized people from others is that of discussion, exchange of opinion and ideas, the ability to differ without quarrelling, to say what you have to say civilly and then to listen civilly to another speaker.

Katherine Anne Porter

opinion people ideas

It is my firm belief that all our lives we are preparing to be somebody or something, even if we don't do it consciously. And the time comes one morning when you wake up and find that you have become irrevocably what you were preparing all this time to be.

Katherine Anne Porter

wake-up belief morning

If I didn't know the ending of a story, I wouldn't begin. I always write my last lines, my last paragraph first, and then I go back and work towards it. I know where I'm going. I know what my goal is. And how I get there is God's grace.

Katherine Anne Porter

grace goal writing

Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.

Katherine Anne Porter

artist giving life

I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.

Katherine Anne Porter

telling-the-truth trying fiction

What we need now is endless courage.

Katherine Anne Porter

endless needs

I get so tired of moral bookkeeping.

Katherine Anne Porter

bookkeeping moral tired

You waste life when you waste good food.

Katherine Anne Porter

good-food waste

Love must be learned again and again... Hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked.

Katherine Anne Porter

hate waiting needs

Civilization, let me tell you what it is. First the soldier, then the merchant, then the priest, then the lawyer. The merchant hires the soldier and priest to conquer the country for him. First the soldier, he is a murderer; then the priest, he is a liar; then the merchant, he is a thief; and they all bring in the lawyer to make their laws and defend their deeds, and there you have your civilization!

Katherine Anne Porter

law liars country

who wants to read about success? It is the early struggle which makes a good story.

Katherine Anne Porter

struggle stories success

The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one's own even more, one's own, for that has been put in our care and we are responsible for its well-being.

Katherine Anne Porter

careers real beauty

The thing is not to follow a pattern. Follow your own pattern of feeling and thought. The thing is to accept your own life and not try to live someone else's life. Look, the thumbprint is not like any other, and the thumbprint is what you must go by.

Katherine Anne Porter

individuality feelings trying

Adventure is something you seek for pleasure, or even for profit, like a gold rush or invading a country;...but experience is what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you.

Katherine Anne Porter

truth running country

Love must be learned and learned again; There is no end.

Katherine Anne Porter

ends love