Katherine Anne Porter Quotes

To me Donnie Darko was about adolescence. And about how, as soon as you start to grow up and you sort of move out into the world, you realize everything is so trippy. That anything can be anything.

Progress everywhere today does seem to come so very heavily disguised as Chaos.

You just look at the world, and you see things unraveling, and you say, 'I wonder what we ought to do?' Things are seldom crystal clear.

Maybe this is just me, but as time goes by, I'm more bewildered by modernity. It gets more unfathomable with every passing year.

It's hard for me to speak of my own development. I'm the one behind the steering wheel, and it is easier to see where the vehicle is going when you are looking at it. For me, it feels like I have been doing the same thing all along.

The world comes to us in an endless stream of puzzle pieces that we would like to think all fit together somehow, but that in fact never do.

Fundamentally, I have no idea how the world works, though I am trying to figure it out.

The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.

We are an intelligent species caught in an historical process. No generation which proceeded us knew what was going on, and there is no reason to assume that we know what's going on or that the generation which follows us will know what's going on. And what kind of trip is it anyway to insist on knowing what's going on?

Watch the clouds. They will teach you about the world of form.

I worry that even those who want to reform are not quite sure how to go about it. There is so much to be done.

I think the world is always improving and always not improving. I think that both are simultaneously happening all the time. I don't think it's one motion unfortunately - I wish we could say it's better, better, better - but I think it's better, bad, better, bad - you know?

I empathize with those who yearn for a simpler world, for some bygone golden age of domestic and international tranquility. But for the mass of humanity it is an age that never was.

We're standing on the deck that's all wooden like the deck of a ship. There's fuzz on it, little bundles. Grandma says it's some kind of pollen from a tree. "Which one?" I'm staring up at all the differents. "Can't help you there, I'm afraid." In Room we knowed what everything was called but in the world there's so much, persons don't even know the names.

The old man always said we should attend to the things we have some hope of understanding, and eternity isn't one of them. Well, this world isn't one either.

I know there is a moral to this story, but I don't know what it is.

Do you ever wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and think, something's not accurate?

Nothing is done. Everything in the world remains to be done or done over.

It is more important to know who you are than where you are going, for where you are going will change as the world around you changes.

I come out of a Cold War sensibility, a Cold War mentality, and during those Cold War years, I used to know, I thought, the answers to everything. And since the end of the Cold War, I'm just a dumb as everyone else.

In a world full of shifting borders, everything is happening all at once in every possible direction.

Where am I? Who am I? How did I come to be here? What is this thing called the world?

I'm trying to keep up with what's happening in this turbulent world.

I walk around the world like a ghost, and sometimes I question whether I even exist. Whether I've ever existed at all.

I don’t know what the future of my career holds, but I know that whatever is over the horizon, the road I’ve traveled to get here is like those Interstates in Texas: everything can look the same, and it can feel like you’re not going anywhere, until you suddenly get where you’re going and realize that you’ve been traveling for a long time.