Charles Portis Quotes

She waited for the train to pass. Then she said, "I sometimes think that people’s hearts are like deep wells. Nobody knows what’s at the bottom. All you can do is imagine by what comes floating to the surface every once in a while.

People, I have discovered, are layers and layers of secrets. You believe you know them, that you understand them, but their motives are always hidden from you, buried in their own hearts. You will never know them, but sometimes you decide to trust them.

So complex is the human spirit that it can itself scarce discern the deep springs which impel it to action.

No person can ever know everything that is in the heart of another. We are all Face Dancers in our souls.

There are so many ways in which the heart of man conceals itself from man!

Never say you know the last word about any human heart.

When we understand every single secret of the universe, there will still be left the eternal mystery of the human heart.

There’s no accounting for the mysteries of the human heart

The human heart is a dark forest.

The workings of the human heart are the profoundest mystery of the universe.

A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.

Why you do something is always kind of a mystery to me.

The Bible says, as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.

We cannot see but a small depth into the heart of man, and can only discover the work of his tongue.

For me, I start at the place that my characters are human. I start at the place that they are onions that are layered and meant to be peeled, just as we as human beings are.

All offences come from the heart.

No one masters the heart.

A strange thing, the human heart in general, and woman's heart in particular.

What do you know what goes on inside a man's mind? Outside he may look like a gentleman, but inside ' e may 'ave the 'ankering for murder.

Until we know what motivates the hearts and minds of men we can understand nothing outside ourselves, nor will we ever reach fulfillment as that greatest miracle of all, the human being.

Of all the things that God has made, the human heart is the one which sheds the most light, alas! and the most darkness.

There is no knowing beyond that membrane, the meniscus of death. What can be seen from here is distorted, refracted. All we can know are those untrustworthy glimpses--that and rumour. The prattle. The dead gossip: it is the reverberation of that gossip against the surface tension of death that the better mediums hear. It is like listening to whispered secrets through a toilet door. It is a crude and muffled susurrus.

What is man but his passion?

It seemed the more I knew about people the more I knew about the strange magic hidden in their hearts.

We have hearts within, Warm, live, improvident, indecent hearts.