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In the arts, you simply cannot secure your bread and your freedom of action too. You cannot be a hostile critic of society and expect society to feed you regularly.
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
Expect
Regularly
Simply
Critic
Society
Hostile
Freedom
Feed
Artist
Arts
Action
Secure
Art
Bread
Cannot
Critics
More quotes by Katherine Anne Porter
The past is never where you think you left 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
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
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
I work whenever I'm let.
Katherine Anne Porter
[Marriage] is the merciless revealer, the great white searchlight turned on the darkest places of human nature.
Katherine Anne Porter
I get so tired of moral bookkeeping.
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
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
Death always leaves one singer to mourn.
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
Physical infidelity is the signal, the notice given, that all fidelities are undermined.
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
Religion put claws on Aunt Sally and gave her a post to whet them on.
Katherine Anne Porter
We do not run from the troubles and dangers that are truly ours, and it is better to learn what they are earlier than later, and if we don't run from the others, we are fools.
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
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
Writing does not exclude the full life it demands it.
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
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
