Katherine Anne Porter Quotes

I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.

I'm like a monk with a taste for hookers.

No sane man can afford to dispense with debilitating pleasures; no ascetic can be considered reliably sane.

A man of pleasure is a man of pains.

Death is half disarmed when the pleasures and interests of the flesh are first denied.

It is always by way of pain one arrives at pleasure.

I'm not an ascetic.

I have always thought of sophistication as rather a feeble substitute for decadence.

I don't enjoy. I suffer from enjoying. It's very Christian.

The best people renounce all for one goal, the eternal fame of mortals; but most people stuff themselves like cattle.

No sane man can afford to dispense with debilitating pleasures. No ascetic can be considered reliably sane.

There are only Epicureans, either crude or refined; Christ was the most refined.

I remember 'the me generation,' which people thought was sort of a passing phase. But it seems to become a way of life now, and when me is at the center of everything, I don't think that you need to go out of yourself and ask God to save your soul or anything along those lines.

It's fun to be debaucherous and the worst version of yourself.

He who takes his fill of every pleasure ... becomes depraved; while he who avoids all pleasures alike ... becomes insensible.

Let it be enough for you to have bread and live virtuously and poorly like Christ, as I do here. I live meanly and don't bother about life or honor ... and I live with the greatest toil and a thousand worries. It is now about 15 years since I had a happy hour.

The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.

Pleasure itself is painful at the bottom.

Religion, in one sense, is a life of self-denial, just as husbandry, in one sense, is a work of death.

A real Christian in an odd number anyway. He feels supreme love for One whom he has never seen, talks familiarly every day to Someone he cannot see, expects to go to heaven on the virtue of Another, empties himself in order to be full, admits he is wrong so he can be declared right, goes down in order to get up, is strongest when he is weakest, richest when he is poorest, and happiest when he feels worst. He dies so he can live, forsakes in order to have, gives away so he can keep, sees the invisible, hears the inaudible, and knows that which passes knowledge.

Do not fret under such assistance as is needful; therein lies one great grace of poverty. It were overambitious to aim at being poor without suffering any inconvenience, in other words, to have the credit of poverty and the convenience of riches.

The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.

The more we struggle for life as pleasure, the more we are actually killing what we love.

The unconscious is not just evil by nature, it is also the source of the highest good: not only dark but also light, not only bestial, semihuman, and demonic but superhuman, spiritual, and, in the classical sense of the word, "divine."

My most serious character flaw is that I don't deny myself much.