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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
Earth
Almost
Motive
Human
Stars
Turning
Humans
Universe
Seasons
Right
Everyone
Chaos
Kind
Feelings
Changing
Mistaking
Life
Others
Pure
Asserts
Order
Movement
Stance
Seems
Takes
Motives

More quotes by Katherine Anne Porter

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I work whenever I'm let.
Katherine Anne Porter
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Religion put claws on Aunt Sally and gave her a post to whet them on.
Katherine Anne Porter
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There is no such thing as an exact synonym and no such thing as an unmixed motive.
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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We are born knowing death.
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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Mexican writer and diplomat, Pasado en claro (A Draft of Shadows) You learn something the day you die. You learn how to die.
Katherine Anne Porter
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we know that the Furies do not come uninvited.
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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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.
Katherine Anne Porter
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I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing.
Katherine Anne Porter
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I get so tired of moral bookkeeping.
Katherine Anne Porter
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One little human truth is that opinionated people don't hold much with other people's opinions, and it is a great pleasure to some of them to be able to ascribe incurable defects, such as belonging to a certain sex or base motives, or lack of understanding, to anyone whose views they disagree with.
Katherine Anne Porter
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Defeat in this world is no disgrace and that is what they cannot understand. If you really fought well and fought for the right thing.
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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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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The past is never where you think you left it.
Katherine Anne Porter
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Death cancels our engagements, but it does not affect the consequences of our acts in life.
Katherine Anne Porter
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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.
Katherine Anne Porter
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It's a man's world, and you men can have it.
Katherine Anne Porter