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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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Katherine Anne Porter
Age: 90 †
Born: 1890
Born: May 15
Died: 1980
Died: September 18
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Indian Creek
Texas
Human
Stars
Turning
Humans
Universe
Seasons
Right
Everyone
Chaos
Kind
Feelings
Changing
Mistaking
Life
Others
Pure
Asserts
Order
Movement
Stance
Seems
Takes
Motives
Earth
Almost
Motive

More quotes by Katherine Anne Porter

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Writing does not exclude the full life it demands it.
Katherine Anne Porter
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We pity people too often for the wrong reasons.
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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Miracles are instantaneous, they cannot be summoned, but come of themselves, usually at unlikely moments and to those who least expect them.
Katherine Anne Porter
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we do know now, all of us, that the most appalling cruelties are committed by apparently virtuous governments in expectation of a great good to come, never learning that the evil done now is the sure destroyer of the expected good.
Katherine Anne Porter
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First impressions are often signals from the deep that we should credit oftener than we do.
Katherine Anne Porter
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Be respectful of words. They mean something.
Katherine Anne Porter
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A novel is really like a symphony where instrument after instrument has to come in at its own time, and no other.
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
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I get so tired of moral bookkeeping.
Katherine Anne Porter
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You are right, none of us live enough, and sometimes I think it is because we mistake hurrah and hullabaloo for experience, we get a sock in the eye and think it is a broken heart.
Katherine Anne Porter
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There are only a few bits of absolute knowledge in the world, people can learn only one or two fundamental facts about each other, the rest is decoration and prejudice.
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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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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All the old houses that I knew when I was a child were full of books, bought generation after generation by members of the family. Nobody told you to read this or not to read that.
Katherine Anne Porter
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Adventure is something you seek for pleasure, or even for profit, like a gold rush or invading a country...but experience is what really happens to you in the long run the truth that finally overtakes you.
Katherine Anne Porter
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I do not understand the world, but I watch it's progress.
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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. . . 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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Marriage is a public declaration of a man and a woman that they have formed a secret alliance, with the intention to belong to, and share with each other, a mystical estate mystical exactly in the sense that the real experience cannot be communicated to others, nor explained even to oneself on rational grounds.
Katherine Anne Porter