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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.
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
Faces
Asceticism
Often
Noticed
Give
Spirituality
Look
Supposed
Looks
Gave
Sometimes
Quite
Giving
Face
Gaunt
Life
Suffering
Dissipation
More quotes by Katherine Anne Porter
Life is a game of piquet played in a bramble bush in very bad weather.
Katherine Anne Porter
There seems to be a kind of order in the universeā¦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
It is such a relief to be told the truth.
Katherine Anne Porter
Be respectful of words. They mean something.
Katherine Anne Porter
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
We have this mistaken notion that everybody in the world has to go to college. The colleges are already crowded with people who never in this world will absorb more than a rudimentary education, and we dilute everything to meet this low standard.
Katherine Anne Porter
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
The nose is surely one of the most impressionable, if not positively erotic, of all our unruly members.
Katherine Anne Porter
We are born knowing death.
Katherine Anne Porter
If I didn't know the ending of a story, I wouldn't begin. I always write my last lines, my last paragraph first, and then I go back and work towards it. I know where I'm going. I know what my goal is. And how I get there is God's grace.
Katherine Anne Porter
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
One of the marks of a gift is to have the courage of it.
Katherine Anne Porter
I look upon literature as an art, and I believe that if you misuse it or abuse it, it will leave you. It is not a thing that you can nail down and use as you want. You have to let it use you, too.
Katherine Anne Porter
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
Death cancels our engagements, but it does not affect the consequences of our acts in life.
Katherine Anne Porter
I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing.
Katherine Anne Porter
Love is purely a creation of the human imagination, it is merely perhaps the most important of all the examples of how the imagination continually outruns the creature it inhabits.
Katherine Anne Porter
. . . 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
I work whenever I'm let.
Katherine Anne Porter
Love must be learned again and again... Hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked.
Katherine Anne Porter