Porter: Any true work of art has got to give you the feeling of reconciliation—what the Greeks would call catharsis, the purification of your mind and imagination—through an ending that is endurable because it is right and true. Oh, not in any pawky individual idea of morality or some parochial idea of right and wrong. Sometimes the end is very tragic, because it needs to be. One of the most perfect and marvelous endings in literature—it raises my hair now—is the little boy at the end of Wuthering Heights, crying that he's afraid to go across the moor because there's a man and woman walking there.
Katherine Anne Porter, The Art of Fiction No. 29, 1963 interviewed by Barbara Thompson Davis, in Women At Work Vol. II, Interviews from the Paris Review