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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
Book
Told
Children
Knew
Full
Houses
Books
Bought
Child
Generation
Read
Members
Family
Generations
House
Nobody
More quotes by Katherine Anne Porter
Death always leaves one singer to mourn.
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
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 specialize in what the French call la petite histoire. I am interested in the individual thumbprint.
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
I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.
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
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
Writing does not exclude the full life it demands it.
Katherine Anne Porter
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
we know that the Furies do not come uninvited.
Katherine Anne Porter
I always write a story in one sitting.
Katherine Anne Porter
We pity people too often for the wrong reasons.
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
I can pray better when I'm comfortable.
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
Adventure is something you seek for pleasure, or even for profit, like a gold rush or invading a country...but experience is what really happens to you in the long run the truth that finally overtakes you.
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
One of the marks of a gift is to have the courage of it.
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