Katherine Anne Porter Quotes

One learns in life to keep silent and draw one's own confusions.

God defend me from myself.

I think we all carry the seeds of our own destruction. You really have to be aware that just because something is good, it doesn't mean it's not going to trigger a self-destructive impulse.

Every faculty and virtue I possess can be used as an instrument with which to worry myself.

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.

I don't think things will lead me astray, as long as I'm tapped into myself.

I've learned during my life that if I am in hell, I make my own glory. I've also been in glory, and perhaps I've made my own hell, but I certainly don't take anyone down with me.

In the commission of evil, fear no man so much as thyself; another is but one witness against thee, thou art a thousand; another thou mayest avoid, thyself thou canst not. Wickedness is its own punishment.

It is ourselves we have to fear. Prejudice is the real robber, and vice the real murderer.

In the end you will be your own undoing. You can't escape you.

Solitude cherishes great virtues and destroys little ones.

I never hurt nobody but myself and that's nobody's business but my own.

We are all selfish and I no more trust myself than others with a good motive.

If I'd trusted myself and listened to myself all the times that I ignored myself, I would have been fine. But everyone has to learn their lesson, and now I've got it.

What I was concerned about when I wrote the 'Downward Spiral' record was being a self-centred destructive force. The point was tearing down everything in a search for something else.

Solitude can be used well by very few people. They who do must have a knowledge of the world to see the foolishness of it, and enough virtue to despise all the vanity.

I'm afraid of me.

The deadliest foe to virtue would be complete self-knowledge.

I can't dislike you, but I will say this to you: you haven't got long before you are all going to kill yourselves, because you are all crazy. And you can project it back at me, but I am only what lives inside each and every one of you.

One cannot violate the promptings of one's nature without having that nature recoil upon itself.

One ought to hold on to one's heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.

I did it to myself. It wasn't society... it wasn't a pusher, it wasn't being blind or being black or being poor. It was all my doing.

You only have the burdens on you that you choose to put there.

What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!

There's a victory, and defeat; the first and best of victories, the lowest and worst of defeats which each man gains or sustains at the hands not of another, but of himself.