Katherine Anne Porter

At that time I was too young for some of the troubles I was having, and I had not yet learned what to do with them. It no longer can matter what kind of troubles they were, or what finally became of them, though all my tradition, background, and training had taught me unanswerably that no one except a coward ever runs away from anything. What nonsense! They should have taught me the difference between courage and foolhardiness, instead of leaving me to find it out for myself. I learned finally that if I still had the sense I was born with, I would take off like a deer at the first warning of certain dangers.

I don’t think they are any more complicated than we are,” said David. “They tie a different set of knots, that’s all.” “That isn’t all, by any means,” said Jenny. “That is too simple.” David, hearing the thin edge in her voice, said no more, but reflected that no matter how he tried to explain his point of view to Jenny, about anything at all, he seemed always to go off at a tangent, or in a circle, or to get bogged down in a spot he had never meant to be in, as if Jenny’s mind refracted his thought instead of absorbing his meaning, or even his feelings about certain things — Indians, for example.

[From <i>Flowering Judas</i>]

She is, her comrades tell her, full of romantic error, for what she defines as cynicism in them is merely 'a developed sense of reality'.

Bread will win the war. Work will win, sugar will win, peach pits will win the war. Nonsense. <i>Not</i> nonsense, I tell you, there's some kind of valuable high explosive to be got out of peach pits. So all the happy housewives hurry during the canning season to lay their baskets of peach pits on the altar of their country. It keeps them busy and makes them feel useful, and all these women running wild with the men away are dangerous, if they aren't given something to keep their little minds out of mischief. So rows of young girls, the intact cradles of the future, with their pure serious faces framed becomingly in Red Cross wimples, roll cock-eyed bandages that will never reach a base hospital, and knit sweaters that will never warm a manly chest, their minds dwelling lovingly on all the blood and mud and the next dance at the Acanthus Club for the officers of the flying corps. Keeping still and quiet will win the war.

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.

the moral seemed to be that one should always have Latin, or at least a good classical poetry quotation, to depend upon in great or desperate moments.

The past is never where you think you left it: you are not the same person you were yesterday

[From <i>The Old Order</i>]

The Grandmother always treated her animal friends as if they were human beings temporarily metamorphosed . . .

He really did look, Miranda thought, like a fine healthy apple this morning.

[From <i>Pale Horse, Pale Rider</i>]

The road to death is a long march beset with all evils. . .

His agitation grew as he felt the oppression of the increasing millions of subhuman beings, the mindless grave-stuff not even fit to be good servants, yet whose mere mass and weight of negative evil threatened to rule the world.

Love must be learned, and learned again; there is no end to it.

I get so tired of moral bookkeeping.

[From <i>Old Mortality</i>]

...religion put claws on Aunt Sally and gave her a post to whet them on.

"Ah! poate că raiul însuşi nu este decât asta. Faptul că Wilibald Graf poate să nu-şi amintească deloc a fi fost Wilibald Graf, nenorocit pelerin pierdut pe această lume crâncenă. Poate că aceasta este semnificaţia binecuvântatelor cuvinte: "iertarea păcatelor!?