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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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Katherine Anne Porter
Age: 90 †
Born: 1890
Born: May 15
Died: 1980
Died: September 18
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Indian Creek
Texas
White
Nature
Revealer
Human
Searchlight
Humans
Merciless
Great
Darkest
Turned
Places
Marriage
More quotes by Katherine Anne Porter
There is no such thing as an exact synonym and no such thing as an unmixed motive.
Katherine Anne Porter
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
It's a man's world, and you men can have it.
Katherine Anne Porter
I think I've only spent about ten percent of my energies on writing. The other ninety percent went to keeping my head above water.
Katherine Anne Porter
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
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
We pity people too often for the wrong reasons.
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
The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one's own.
Katherine Anne Porter
Childhood is the fiery furnace in which we are melted down to essentials and that essential shaped for good.
Katherine Anne Porter
We are born knowing death.
Katherine Anne Porter
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Evil is dull, that is the worst of it.
Katherine Anne Porter
we know that the Furies do not come uninvited.
Katherine Anne Porter