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The Very Thing About People That Makes The Human Race Interesting Is Also The Thing That Makes It So Hard To Get Anything Done Without The Most Horrible Confusions: No Two People Think Exactly The Same Way About Anything.

-Katherine Anne Porter

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The Very Thing About

Katherine Anne Porter

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The Very Thing About People That Makes The Human Race Interesting Is Also The Thing That Makes It So Hard To Get Anything Done Without The Most Horrible Confusions: No Two People Think Exactly The Same Way About Anything.

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More From Katherine Anne Porter

I Get So Tired Of Moral Bookkeeping.

I'm Not Afraid Of Life And I'm Not Afraid Of Death: Dying's The Bore.

Who Wants To Read About Success? It Is The Early Struggle Which Makes A Good Story.

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.

All The Old Houses That I Knew When I Was A Child Were Full Of Books, Bought Generation After Generation By Members Of The Family. Nobody Told You To Read This Or Not To Read That.

I Want To Go And See The World. I Want To Know The World Like The Palm Of My Hand.

I Think Joy Is Just As Instructive As Pain, And I Like It Better. I Never Meant To Suffer Any More Than I Could Help; My Nature Was Meant For Happiness, A Daylight Art And Living.

You Waste Life When You Waste Good Food.

The Very Thing About People That Makes The Human Race Interesting Is Also The Thing That Makes It So Hard To Get Anything Done Without The Most Horrible Confusions: No Two People Think Exactly The Same Way About Anything.

I Always Write A Story In One Sitting.

We Pity People Too Often For The Wrong Reasons.

It Is Such A Relief To Be Told The Truth.

Art Is A Vocation, As Much As Anything In This World. For The Real Artist, It Is The Most Natural Thing In The World, Not As Necessary As Air And Water, Perhaps, But As Food And Water. But We Really Do Lead Almost A Monastic Life, You Know; To Follow It You Very Often Have To Give Up Something.

The Real Sin Against Life Is To Abuse And Destroy Beauty, Even One's Own.

Untrained Minds Have Always Been A Nuisance To The Military Police Of Orthodoxy. God-intoxicated Mystics And Untidy Saints With Only A White Blaze Of Divine Love Where Their Minds Should Have Been, Are Perpetually Creating Almost As Much Disorder Within The Law As Outside It.

Marriage Is A Public Declaration Of A Man And A Woman That They Have Formed A Secret Alliance, With The Intention To Belong To, And Share With Each Other, A Mystical Estate; Mystical Exactly In The Sense That The Real Experience Cannot Be Communicated To Others, Nor Explained Even To Oneself On Rational Grounds.

Death Always Leaves One Singer To Mourn.

But The Great Leveler, Death: Not Even The Gods Can Defend A Man, Not Even One They Love, That Day When Fate Takes Hold And Lays Him Out At Last.

I Have No Patience With This Dreadful Idea That Whatever You Have In You Has To Come Out, That You Can't Suppress True Talent. People Can Be Destroyed; They Can Be Bent, Distorted, And Completely Crippled. In Spite Of All The Poetry, All The Philosophy To The Contrary, We Are Not Really Masters Of Our Fate.

Words Can Never Get At The Truth.

There Are Only A Few Bits Of Absolute Knowledge In The World, People Can Learn Only One Or Two Fundamental Facts About Each Other, The Rest Is Decoration And Prejudice.

Life Comes First, An Art Not Rooted In Human Experience Is Not Worth A Damn, But Different Kinds Of Minds Have Different Kinds Of Experience, And All I Ask Of Any Man Is Validity; And There Should Be Place For Every Type And Kind Of Mind.

Love Must Be Learned And Learned Again; There Is No End.

It's A Man's World, And You Men Can Have It.

Freedom Is A Dangerous Intoxicant And Very Few People Can Tolerate It In Any Quantity.

Could She Fall So Low? No, There Were Limits, And She Believed She Still Knew Where Some Of Them Were.

Eventually Women Will Learn There's No Such Thing As Freedom. Their Husbands Are Just As Fastened To The Deck As They Are. Men Get Onto A Treadmill And Never Got Off.

There Has Been A Marvelous Joyous Carnival Of Mourning For Edith Piaf And Jean Coctaeau, And It Was Real! They Died As They Had Lived, With Style And Grace And Their Proper Eccentricity; And Paris Loves Anybody Who Can Live Anarchically And Be Delightful Entertainment At The Same Time. So Do I.

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.

I Can Pray Better When I'm Comfortable.

[marriage] Is The Merciless Revealer, The Great White Searchlight Turned On The Darkest Places Of Human Nature.

Freedom, Remember, Is Not The Same As Liberty.

All Working, Practical Political Systems, Even Those Professing To Originate In Moral Grandeur, Are Based Upon And Operate By Contempt Of Human Life And The Individual Fate.

The Greatest Art Comes Out Of Warmth And Conviction And Deep Feeling, But Then, Very Few People, Even Geniuses, Have All That.

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.

What We Need Now Is Endless Courage.

It Is As Hard To Find A Neutral Critic As It Is A Neutral Country In Time Of War. I Suppose If A Critic Were Neutral, He Wouldn't Trouble To Write Anything.

I Shall Try To Tell The Truth, But The Result Will Be Fiction.

Telling The Truth

Don't You Love Being Alive?" Asked Miranda. "don't You Love Weather And The Colors At Different Times Of The Day, And All The Sounds And Noises Like Children Screaming In The Next Lot, And Automobile Horns And Little Bands Playing In The Street And The Smell Of Food Cooking?" "i Love To Swim, Too." Said Adam. "so Do I," Said Miranda, "we Never Did Swim Together.

I Have Not Much Interest In Anyone's Personal History After The Tenth Year, Not Even My Own. Whatever One Was Going To Be Was All Prepared Before That.

Personal History

I Love To Praise What I Love, And I Won't For A Minute Believe That Love Is Blind -- Indeed, It Gives Clearness Without Sharpness, And Surely That Is The Best Light In Which To Look At Anything.

We Have The Bad Habit, Some Of Us, Of Looking Back To A Time - Almost Any Time Will Do - When Society Was Stable And Orderly, Family Ties Stronger And Deeper, Love More Lasting And Faithful, And So On. Let Me Be Your Cassandra Prophesying After The Fact, And A Long Study Of The Documents In The Case: It Was Never True, That Is, No Truer Than It Is Now.

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.

God Does Not Know Whether A Skin Is Black Or White, He Sees Only Souls.

With The Most Infinite Tenderness I Have Ever Known In My Life, He Put His Arms Around Me, Gently, Gently, And I Embraced Him Around The Neck, And We Touched.

If You Are Required To Kill Someone Today, On The Promise Of A Political Leader That Someone Else Shall Live In Peace Tomorrow, Believe Me, You Are Not Only A Double Murderer, You Are A Suicide, Too.

Advance Money Is Really A Delusion, That Is To Say, I Get No More Until It Is Paid Out In Sales, But Still, Living From Hand To Mouth And Day To Day As I Do, A Nickel In The Hand Is More Useful Than The Same Nickel Next Year. What Do I Know About Next Year? I've Never Been There. I Don't Know Any One Who Has.

Writing Does Not Exclude The Full Life; It Demands It.

Miracles Are Instantaneous, They Cannot Be Summoned, But Come Of Themselves, Usually At Unlikely Moments And To Those Who Least Expect Them.

I've Been Called A Stylist Until I Really Could Tear My Hair Out. And I Simply Don't Believe In Style. The Style Is You.

One Of The Marks Of A Gift Is To Have The Courage Of It.

Your Mind Outwears All Sorts Of Things You May Set Your Heart Upon; You Can Enjoy It When All Other Things Are Taken Away.

A Cultivated Style Would Be Like A Mask. Everybody Knows It's A Mask, And Sooner Or Later You Must Show Yourself -- Or At Least, You Show Yourself As Someone Who Could Not Afford To Show Himself, And So Created Something To Hide Behind. You Do Not Create A Style. You Work, And Develop Yourself; Your Style Is An Emanation From Your Own Being.

Even St. Teresa Said, "i Can Pray Better When I'm Comfortable," And She Refused To Wear Her Haircloth Shirt Or Starve Herself. I Don't Think Living In Cellars And Starving Is Better For An Artist Than It Is For Anybody Else.

I Do Not Understand The World, But I Watch It's Progress.

I Have A Great Deal Of Religious Symbolism In My Stories Because I Have A Very Deep Sense Of Religion And Also I Have A Religious Training. And I Suppose You Don't Say, `i'm Going To Have The Flowering Judas Tree Stand For Betrayal,' But Of Course It Does.

I Specialize In What The French Call La Petite Histoire. I Am Interested In The Individual Thumbprint.

Love Must Be Learned Again And Again... Hate Needs No Instruction, But Waits Only To Be Provoked.

Love Is Purely A Creation Of The Human Imagination, It Is Merely Perhaps The Most Important Of All The Examples Of How The Imagination Continually Outruns The Creature It Inhabits.

I Always Knew One Thing, That Life Is Made Bearable And Possible And Liveable By The Relations Of One Human Being To Another, The Individual Love And Gentleness Between Persons, Or In Any Case, The Unbreakable Bond That Grows And Fastens Lives Together In All Sorts Of Mysterious Ways.

Unbreakable Bonds

Now And Again Thousands Of Memories Converge, Harmonize, Arrange Themselves Around A Central Idea In A Coherent Form, And I Write A Story.

Nothing Is Mine, I Have Only Nothing But It Is Enough, It Is Beautiful And It Is All Mine. Do I Even Walk About In My Own Skin Or Is It Something I Have Borrowed To Spare My Modesty?

But My Belief Is Growing That Our Political And Social Evils Are Remediable, If Only All Of Us Who Want A Change For The Better Just Get Up And Work For It, All The Time, With As Much Knowledge And Intelligence As We Can Muster For It. Half The Wrongs Of Human Life Exist Because Of The Inertia Of People Who Simply Will Not Use Their Energies In Fighting For What They Believe In. And Finally The Wrongs Roll Up Into World Catastrophes And Millions Of Deaths And A Terrible Set-back For All Mankind.

Education Must Be Taken Out Of The Hands Of Rich Illiterates, Third Rate Politicians, And Put Where It Belongs: In The Care Of Scholars. At Present The Whole University System Is Rotten To The Core, And An Appalling Waste Of Time, Energy And Money.

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.

Every Young Artist Has To Do It One Way, His [or Her] Way, And The Hell With Patterns. Remember Who You Are And Where You Are And What You Are Doing.... And Never Take Advice, Including This.

You Can't Write About People Out Of Textbooks, And You Can't Use Jargon. You Have To Speak Clearly And Simply And Purely In A Language That A Six-year-old Child Can Understand; And Yet Have The Meanings And The Overtones Of Language, And The Implications, That Appeal To The Highest Intelligence.

I Work Whenever I'm Let.

You Are Right, None Of Us Live Enough, And Sometimes I Think It Is Because We Mistake Hurrah And Hullabaloo For Experience, We Get A Sock In The Eye And Think It Is A Broken Heart.

Physical Infidelity Is The Signal, The Notice Given, That All Fidelities Are Undermined.

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.

Writing, In Any Sense That Matters, Cannot Be Taught. It Can Only Be Learned By Each Separate One Of Us In His Own Way, By The Use Of His Own Powers Of Imagination And Perception, The Ability To Learn The Lessons He Has Set For Himself.

The Past Is Never Where You Think You Left It.

Two-thirds Of My Energies Go In Trying To Save One-third For Work.

First Impressions Are Often Signals From The Deep That We Should Credit Oftener Than We Do.

First Impression

You Shouldn't Side-step Suffering If You Have To Go Through It To Get Where You're Going.

I Was Always Restless, Always A Roving Spirit. When I Was A Little Child I Was Always Running Away. I Never Got Very Far, But They Were Always Having To Come And Fetch Me. Once When I Was About Six, My Father Came To Get Me Somewhere I'd Gone, And He Told Me Later He'd Asked Me, "why Are You So Restless? Why Can't You Stay Here With Us?" And I Said To Him, "i Want To Go And See The World. I Want To Know The World Like The Palm Of My Hand.

A Story Is Like Something You Wind Out Of Yourself. Like A Spider, It Is A Web You Weave, And You Love Your Story Like A Child.

I Was Right Not To Be Afraid Of Any Thief But Myself, Who Will End By Leaving Me Nothing.

There Are So Many Things That We Are Capable Of, That We Could Be Or Do. The Potentialities Are So Great That We Never, Any Of Us, Are More Than One-fourth Fulfilled.

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.

Religion Put Claws On Aunt Sally And Gave Her A Post To Whet Them On.

In The Arts, You Simply Cannot Secure Your Bread And Your Freedom Of Action Too. You Cannot Be A Hostile Critic Of Society And Expect Society To Feed You Regularly.

A Novel Is Really Like A Symphony Where Instrument After Instrument Has To Come In At Its Own Time, And No Other.

. . . All That She Had Had, And All That She Had Missed, Were Lost Together, And Were Twice Lost In This Landslide Of Remembered Losses.

We Are Born Knowing Death.

We Do Not Run From The Troubles And Dangers That Are Truly Ours, And It Is Better To Learn What They Are Earlier Than Later, And If We Don't Run From The Others, We Are Fools.

Evil Is Dull, That Is The Worst Of It.

We Do Know Now, All Of Us, That The Most Appalling Cruelties Are Committed By Apparently Virtuous Governments In Expectation Of A Great Good To Come, Never Learning That The Evil Done Now Is The Sure Destroyer Of The Expected Good.

Life Is A Game Of Piquet Played In A Bramble Bush In Very Bad Weather.

One Little Human Truth Is That Opinionated People Don't Hold Much With Other People's Opinions, And It Is A Great Pleasure To Some Of Them To Be Able To Ascribe Incurable Defects, Such As Belonging To A Certain Sex; Or Base Motives, Or Lack Of Understanding, To Anyone Whose Views They Disagree With.

Mexican Writer And Diplomat, "pasado En Claro" ("a Draft Of Shadows") You Learn Something The Day You Die. You Learn How To Die.

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.

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.

You Do Not Create A Style. You Work, And Develop Yourself; Your Style Is An Emanation From Your Own Being.

There Seems To Be A Kind Of Order In The Universe…in The Movement Of The Stars And The Turning Of The Earth And The Changing Of The Seasons. But Human Life Is Almost Pure Chaos. Everyone Takes His Stance, Asserts His Own Right And Feelings, Mistaking The Motives Of Others, And His Own.

What We Need Is Endless Courage.

Defeat In This World Is No Disgrace And That Is What They Cannot Understand. If You Really Fought Well And Fought For The Right Thing.

No Man Can Be Explained By His Personal History, Least Of All A Poet.

Personal History

I Don't Believe In Intuition. When You Get Sudden Flashes Of Perception, It Is Just The Brain Working Faster Than Usual. But You've Been Getting Ready To Know It For A Long Time, And When It Comes, You Feel You've Known It Always.

Death Cancels Our Engagements, But It Does Not Affect The Consequences Of Our Acts In Life.

[on Gertrude Stein's Making Of Americans:] I Doubt If All The People Who Should Read It Will Read It For A Great While Yet, For It Is In Such A Limited Edition, And Reading It Is Anyhow A Sort Of Permanent Occupation.

Lovemaking Surely Must Be, For Human Beings At Our Present State Of Development, One Of The More Private Enterprises. Who Would Want A Witness To That Entire Self-abandonment And Helplessness?

I Am In Paris. Yes Ma'am , I Made It Back. I Came Up From Berlin, Stopped Here Ten Days, Fought A Losing Battle Against My Deepest Inclinations, Pulled Myself Out By The Hair And Went To Madrid...madrid Is A Lovely Enchanting City, And There Was Almost Ready For Me A Kind Of Penthouse Full Of Sunlight, A Roof Garden, And So On. I Gave One Look At It All, Returned To The Hotel And Went To Bed And Wept Bitterly For Eleven Hours...why? Because I Had Seen Paris And Could Not Endure The Thought Of Being Anywhere Else.

I Started Out With Nothing In The World But A Kind Of Passion, A Driving Desire. I Don't Know Where It Came From, And I Don't Know Why - Or Why I Have Been So Stubborn About It That Nothing Could Deflect Me. But This Thing Between Me And My Writing Is The Strongest Bond I Have Ever Had - Stronger Than Any Bond Or Any Engagement With Any Human Being Or With Any Other Work I've Ever Done.

Those Who Give The Orders Are Not The Ones To Die The People Who Are Doing The Work And The Fighting And The Dying, And Those Who Are Doing The Talking, Are Not All The Same People.

Be Bold, And Try Not To Fall In Love With Your Faults. Don't Be So Afraid Of Giving Yourself Away, Either, For If Yo Write, You Must. And If You Can't Face That, Better Not Write.

Falling In Love

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!

I Think I've Only Spent About Ten Percent Of My Energies On Writing. The Other Ninety Percent Went To Keeping My Head Above Water.

Most People Won't Realise That Writing Is A Craft. You Have To Take Your Apprenticeship In It Like Anything Else.

I Will Never Again Attempt To Tell Any Young Person What To Do - The Really Gifted Don't Need Advice And The Others Can't Take It.

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.

They Had Both Noticed That A Life Of Dissipation Sometimes Gave To A Face The Look Of Gaunt Suffering Spirituality That A Life Of Asceticism Was Supposed To Give And Quite Often Did Not.

Each Generation Must Get On The Same Old Merry-go-round, Only Disguised In A Fresh Coat Of Paint.

I Want To Live In A World Capital Or The Howling Wilderness.

I Look Upon Literature As An Art, And I Believe That If You Misuse It Or Abuse It, It Will Leave You. It Is Not A Thing That You Can Nail Down And Use As You Want. You Have To Let It Use You, Too.

The Nose Is Surely One Of The Most Impressionable, If Not Positively Erotic, Of All Our Unruly Members.

In This Moment She Felt That She Had Been Robbed Of An Enormous Number Of Valuable Things, Whether Material Or Intangible: Things Lost Or Broken By Her Own Fault, Things She Had Forgotten And Left In Houses When She Moved: Books Borrowed From Her And Not Returned, Journeys She Had Planned And Had Not Made, Words She Had Waited To Hear Spoken To Her And Had Not Heard, And The Words She Meant To Answer With. . . .

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.

There Have Been Many Times When I Have Been So Entirely Sickened Of Life It Was Very Hard To Work To Keep On, A Half Dozen Times I Have Been Tempted To Suicide, But I Am Glad I Did Not Give Way, For I Have Always Felt That The Last Half Of My Life Would Somehow Atone For The First Half, And I Still Think It May ... It Is Not Possible To Live In This World Without Suffering Unless One Is A Born Stone. But It Is Also Possible To Have A Great Deal Of Happiness In Spite Of The Suffering.

The Human Heart Is Not Yet So Corroded That It Can Read Off The Extinction Of These Two Men Without A Shock To The Very Roots Of Its Belief In Justice And Humanity.

We Have This Mistaken Notion That Everybody In The World Has To Go To College. The Colleges Are Already Crowded With People Who Never In This World Will Absorb More Than A Rudimentary Education, And We Dilute Everything To Meet This Low Standard.

Grant That The Idea Of God Is The Most Splendid Single Act Of The Creative Human Imagination, And That All His Multiple Faces And Attributes Correspond To Some Need And Satisfy Some Deep Desire In Mankind; Still, For The Inquirers, It Is Impossible Not To Conclude That This Mystical Concept Has Been Harnessed Rudely To Machinery Of The Most Mundane Sort, And Has Been Made To Serve The Ends Of An Organization Which, Ruling Under Divine Guidance, Has Ruled Very Little Better, And In Some Respects, Worse, Than Certain Rather Mediocre But Frankly Manmade Systems Of Government.

Divine Guidance

And Yet, We Know How Fatal The Pursuit Of Liveliness May Be: It May Result In ... Tiresome Acrobatics. ... Flashy Effects Distract The Mind. They Destroy Their Persuasiveness; You Would Not Believe A Man Was Very Intent On Ploughing A Furrow If He Carried A Hoop With Him And Jumped Through It At Every Other Step. ... When Virtuosity Gets The Upper Hand Of Your Theme, Or Is Better Than Your Idea, It Is Time To Quit.

There Is No Such Thing As An Exact Synonym And No Such Thing As An Unmixed Motive.

Death Is Loneliness In Its Purest Form.

We Know That The Furies Do Not Come Uninvited.

Childhood Is The Fiery Furnace In Which We Are Melted Down To Essentials And That Essential Shaped For Good.

Be Respectful Of Words. They Mean Something.

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