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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

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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
Exactly
Explained
Others
Marriage
Mystical
Cannot
Share
Declaration
Communicated
Real
Public
Formed
Alliance
Even
Secret
Belong
Grounds
Men
Woman
Rational
Alliances
Experience
Intention
Estate
Oneself
Estates
Sense

More quotes by Katherine Anne Porter

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I want to live in a world capital or the howling wilderness.
Katherine Anne Porter
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Freedom, remember, is not the same as liberty.
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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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 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
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I do not understand the world, but I watch it's progress.
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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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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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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Childhood is the fiery furnace in which we are melted down to essentials and that essential shaped for good.
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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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
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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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It is my firm belief that all our lives we are preparing to be somebody or something, even if we don't do it consciously. And the time comes one morning when you wake up and find that you have become irrevocably what you were preparing all this time to be.
Katherine Anne Porter
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Death is loneliness in its purest form.
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 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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It is such a relief to be told the truth.
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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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