Katherine Anne Porter Quotes
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The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one's own even more, one's own, for that has been put in our care and we are responsible for its well-being.
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I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing.
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One of the marks of a gift is to have the courage of it.
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The human heart is not yet so corroded that it can read off the extinction of these two men without a shock to the very roots of its belief in justice and humanity.
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Most people won't realize that writing is a craft. You have to take your apprenticeship in it like anything else.
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Our being is subject to all the chances of life. There are so many things we are capable of, that we could be or do. The potentialities are so great that we never, any of us, are more than one-fourth fulfilled.
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Experience is what really happens to you in the long run; the truth that finally overtakes you.
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Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.
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Love must be learned, and learned again; there is no end to it.
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A cultivated style would be like a mask. Everybody knows it's a mask, and sooner or later you must show yourself - or at least, you show yourself as someone who could not afford to show himself, and so created something to hide behind... You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being.
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Miracles are instantaneous, they cannot be summoned, but come of themeselves, usually at unlikely moments and to those who least expect them.
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I'm not afraid of life and I'm not afraid of death: Dying's the bore.
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I finished the thing; but I think I sprained my soul.
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They had both noticed that a life of dissipation sometimes gave to a face the look of gaunt suffering spirituality that a life of asceticism was supposed to give and quite often did not.
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I have not much interest in anyone's personal history after the tenth year, not even my own. Whatever one was going to be was all prepared before that.
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I have no patience with this dreadful idea that whatever you have in you has to come out, that you can't suppress true talent. People can be destroyed; they can be bent, distorted, and completely crippled . . . In spite of all the poetry, all the philosophy to the contrary, we are not really masters of our fate.
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I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.
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The road to death is a long march beset with all evils, and the heart fails little by little at each new terror, the bones rebel at each step, the mind sets up its own bitter resistance and to what end? The barriers sink one by one, and no covering of the eyes shuts out the landscape of disaster, nor the sight of crimes committed there.
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Physical infidelity is the signal, the notice given, that all fidelities are undermined.
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There seems to be a kind of order in the universe, in the movement of the stars and the turning of the earth and the changing of the seasons, and even in the cycle of human life. But human life itself is almost pure chaos. Everyone takes his stance, asserts his own rights and feelings, mistaking the motives of others, and his own.
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It is such a relief to be told the truth.
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It's a man's world, and you men can have it.
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You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.