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.
Katherine Anne PorterYour mind outwears all sorts of things you may set your heart upon; you can enjoy it when all other things are taken away.
Katherine Anne PorterThose 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.
Katherine Anne PorterYou 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.
Katherine Anne Porter