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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
House
Nobody
Book
Told
Children
Knew
Full
Houses
Books
Bought
Child
Generation
Read
Members
Family
Generations
More quotes by Katherine Anne Porter
Be respectful of words. They mean something.
Katherine Anne Porter
First impressions are often signals from the deep that we should credit oftener than we do.
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
Death cancels our engagements, but it does not affect the consequences of our acts in life.
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
I get so tired of moral bookkeeping.
Katherine Anne Porter
Writing does not exclude the full life it demands it.
Katherine Anne Porter
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
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
The nose is surely one of the most impressionable, if not positively erotic, of all our unruly members.
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
Could she fall so low? No, there were limits, and she believed she still knew where some of them were.
Katherine Anne Porter
Untrained minds have always been a nuisance to the military police of orthodoxy. God-intoxicated mystics and untidy saints with only a white blaze of divine love where their minds should have been, are perpetually creating almost as much disorder within the law as outside it.
Katherine Anne Porter
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
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
Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning.
Katherine Anne Porter
We are born knowing death.
Katherine Anne Porter
Love must be learned again and again... Hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked.
Katherine Anne Porter
The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one's own.
Katherine Anne Porter
It is such a relief to be told the truth.
Katherine Anne Porter
