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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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Katherine Anne Porter
Age: 90 †
Born: 1890
Born: May 15
Died: 1980
Died: September 18
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Indian Creek
Texas
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Nobody
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More quotes by Katherine Anne Porter
Life is a game of piquet played in a bramble bush in very bad weather.
Katherine Anne Porter
I specialize in what the French call la petite histoire. I am interested in the individual thumbprint.
Katherine Anne Porter
Be respectful of words. They mean something.
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
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
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
There has been a marvelous joyous carnival of mourning for Edith Piaf and Jean Coctaeau, and it was real! They died as they had lived, with style and grace and their proper eccentricity and Paris loves anybody who can live anarchically and be delightful entertainment at the same time. So do I.
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
I work whenever I'm let.
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
Could she fall so low? No, there were limits, and she believed she still knew where some of them were.
Katherine Anne Porter
With the most infinite tenderness I have ever known in my life, he put his arms around me, gently, gently, and I embraced him around the neck, and we touched.
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
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
Be bold, and try not to fall in love with your faults. Don't be so afraid of giving yourself away, either, for if yo write, you must. And if you can't face that, better not write.
Katherine Anne Porter
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
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
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
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
