Quote

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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Katherine Anne Porter
Age: 90 †
Born: 1890
Born: May 15
Died: 1980
Died: September 18
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Indian Creek
Texas
House
Nobody
Book
Told
Children
Knew
Full
Houses
Books
Bought
Child
Generation
Read
Members
Family
Generations

More quotes by Katherine Anne Porter

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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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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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Education must be taken out of the hands of rich illiterates, third rate politicians, and put where it belongs: in the care of scholars. At present the whole University system is rotten to the core, and an appalling waste of time, energy and money.
Katherine Anne Porter
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I always write a story in one sitting.
Katherine Anne Porter
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We pity people too often for the wrong reasons.
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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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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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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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
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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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. . . 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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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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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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Love must be learned again and again... Hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked.
Katherine Anne Porter
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Writing does not exclude the full life it demands it.
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 want to live in a world capital or the howling wilderness.
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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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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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