#katherine anne porter

[key-cat]

スタイルは作り出すものではありません。働き、自らを成長させれば、あなたのスタイルは自身の存在から発せられるのです。

You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being.

Katherine Anne Porter キャサリン・アン・ポーター

[lyssahumana]

[elegantzombielite]

"The past is never where you think you left it."

Katherine Anne Porter, writer and activist (15th May 1890-1980)

[artisthomes]

Katherine Anne Porter's home in Kyle, Texas, United States

[infiniterichesinalittleroom]

But 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.

Katherine Anne Porter • Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews: Second Series

[disceautdiscede]

Mankind has always built a little more than he has hitherto been able or willing to destroy; got more children than he has been able to kill; invented more laws and customs than he had any intention of observing; founded more religions than he was able to practice or even to believe in; made in general many more promises than he could keep; and has been known more than once to commit suicide through mere fear of death. Now in our time, in his pride to explore his universe to its unimaginable limits and to exceed his possible powers, he has at last produced an embarrassing series of engines too powerful for their containers and too tricky for their mechanicians; millions of labor-saving gadgets which can be rendered totally useless by the mere failure of the public power plants, and has reduced himself to such helplessness that a dozen or less of the enemy could disable a whole city by throwing a few switches. This paradoxical creature has committed all these extravagances and created all these dangers and sufferings in a quest - we are told - for peace and security.

-Katherine Anne Porter, The Future is Now

[violettesiren]

Now crunches down the frozen stalk On sterile snow: Chill core of winter fruit in the mouth Is bitter as a blow.

Pluck out this seed and bury it Under a rock: Against the winter measure of thin days Tapped out upon a clock.

Winter Burial by Katherine Anne Porter

[viecome]

Empecé sin nada... Katherine Anne Porter

Yo nunca he hecho una carrera de nada, sabe usted, ni siquiera de la literatura. Empecé sin nada, excepto una especie de pasión, un deseo impulsor. No sé de dónde venía y no sé por qué he sido tan obstinada en ese sentido que nada pudo desviarme. Pero esta cosa que existe entre mi persona y mi literatura es el lazo más fuerte que he conocido con cualquier otra persona u otro trabajo que haya…

[famousdeaths]

Katherine Anne Porter was an American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, poet and political activist. Her 1962 novel Ship of Fools was the best...

Link: Katherine Anne Porter

[linusjf]

Katherine Anne Porter: Past

“The past is never where you think you left it.” —Katherine Anne Porter, writer and activist.

[jojoware]

As she began "Dear..." she thought again that it did not matter which of the lot she addressed the letter to, for they presented to her the impermeable front of what she called "the family attitude" – suspicion of the worst based on insufficient knowledge of her life, and moral disapproval based firmly on their general knowledge of the weakness of human nature. Jenny couldn't possibly be up to any good, or she would have stayed at home, where she belonged. That is the sum of it, thought Jenny, and wouldn't their blood run cold if they could only know the facts? Ah well, the family can get under your skin with little needles and scalpels if you venture too near them: they attach suckers to you and draw your blood from every pore if you don't watch out. But that didn't keep you from loving them, nor them from loving you, with that strange longing, demanding, hopeless tenderness and bitterness, wound into each other in a net of living nerves.

from Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter

[arfonoja]

Katherine Anne Porter - Wino o południu

[infiniterichesinalittleroom]

It just simply divided my life, cut across it like that. So that everything before that was just getting ready, and after that I was in some strange way altered, ready. It took me a long time to go out and live in the world again. I was really “alienated,” in the pure sense. It was, I think, the fact that I really had participated in death, that I knew what death was, and had almost experienced it. I had what the Christians call the “beatific vision,” and the Greeks called the “happy day,” the happy vision just before death. Now if you have had that, and survived it, come back from it, you are no longer like other people, and there’s no use deceiving yourself that you are. But you see, I did: I made the mistake of thinking I was quite like anybody else, of trying to live like other people. It took me a long time to realize that that simply wasn't true, that I had my own needs and that I had to live like me.

Katherine Anne Porter • Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews: Second Series

[disceautdiscede]

And yet it may be that what we have is a world not on the verge of flying apart, but an uncreated one - still in shapeless fragments waiting to be put together properly. I imagine that when we want something better, we may have it: at perhaps no greater price than we have already paid for the worse.

-Katherine Anne Porter, The Future is Now

[violettesiren]

These winds of Martinmas have stripped the trees To cover the seeds of summer, and the limbs Are rough as roots, and roots are cold as stone: I catch my breath and shiver to the bone, Blood-kinfolk to the crickets and the bees.

The deer have cut their trails in bedded leaves Worm-bitter apples rot beside the wall, The scanty crop is stored in loft and bin; All day I feel the winter hurrying in All night the hunting owls cry at my eaves.

This is a country aching at the core, Dead-tired of the year's labors, weary beyond sleep: Seeded once more in stones again the yield Of a forgotten scrawcrow in a field Set there to frighten birds that come no more.

November in Windham by Katherine Anne Porter