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I get so tired of moral bookkeeping.

Katherine Anne Porter

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Katherine Anne Porter
Age: 90 †
Born: 1890
Born: May 15
Died: 1980
Died: September 18
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Indian Creek
Texas
Bookkeeping
Tired
Moral

More quotes by Katherine Anne Porter

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Perhaps the habit which distinguishes civilized people from others is that of discussion, exchange of opinion and ideas, the ability to differ without quarrelling, to say what you have to say civilly and then to listen civilly to another speaker.
Katherine Anne Porter
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We do not run from the troubles and dangers that are truly ours, and it is better to learn what they are earlier than later, and if we don't run from the others, we are fools.
Katherine Anne Porter
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Childhood is the fiery furnace in which we are melted down to essentials and that essential shaped for good.
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One of the marks of a gift is to have the courage of it.
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Evil is dull, that is the worst of it.
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. . . all that she had had, and all that she had missed, were lost together, and were twice lost in this landslide of remembered losses.
Katherine Anne Porter
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Physical infidelity is the signal, the notice given, that all fidelities are undermined.
Katherine Anne Porter
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The greatest art comes out of warmth and conviction and deep feeling, but then, very few people, even geniuses, have all that.
Katherine Anne Porter
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Could she fall so low? No, there were limits, and she believed she still knew where some of them were.
Katherine Anne Porter
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The past is never where you think you left it.
Katherine Anne Porter
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Lovemaking surely must be, for human beings at our present state of development, one of the more private enterprises. Who would want a witness to that entire self-abandonment and helplessness?
Katherine Anne Porter
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Untrained minds have always been a nuisance to the military police of orthodoxy. God-intoxicated mystics and untidy saints with only a white blaze of divine love where their minds should have been, are perpetually creating almost as much disorder within the law as outside it.
Katherine Anne Porter
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Be bold, and try not to fall in love with your faults. Don't be so afraid of giving yourself away, either, for if yo write, you must. And if you can't face that, better not write.
Katherine Anne Porter
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I have a great deal of religious symbolism in my stories because I have a very deep sense of religion and also I have a religious training. And I suppose you don't say, `I'm going to have the flowering judas tree stand for betrayal,' but of course it does.
Katherine Anne Porter
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[Marriage] is the merciless revealer, the great white searchlight turned on the darkest places of human nature.
Katherine Anne Porter
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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. But human life is almost pure chaos. Everyone takes his stance, asserts his own right and feelings, mistaking the motives of others, and his own.
Katherine Anne Porter
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In the arts, you simply cannot secure your bread and your freedom of action too. You cannot be a hostile critic of society and expect society to feed you regularly.
Katherine Anne Porter
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Freedom, remember, is not the same as liberty.
Katherine Anne Porter
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I've been called a stylist until I really could tear my hair out. And I simply don't believe in style. The style is you.
Katherine Anne Porter
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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.
Katherine Anne Porter