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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

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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
Others
Civilized
Another
Discussion
Ideas
Conflict
Quarrelling
Without
Habit
Distinguishes
People
Listen
Differ
Perhaps
Speaker
Opinion
Speakers
Ability
Exchange

More quotes by Katherine Anne Porter

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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
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Be respectful of words. They mean something.
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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I always write a story in one sitting.
Katherine Anne Porter
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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
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Life is a game of piquet played in a bramble bush in very bad weather.
Katherine Anne Porter
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Death cancels our engagements, but it does not affect the consequences of our acts in life.
Katherine Anne Porter
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Writing does not exclude the full life it demands it.
Katherine Anne Porter
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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
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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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The nose is surely one of the most impressionable, if not positively erotic, of all our unruly members.
Katherine Anne Porter
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I do not understand the world, but I watch it's progress.
Katherine Anne Porter
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You waste life when you waste good food.
Katherine Anne Porter
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The past is never where you think you left it.
Katherine Anne Porter
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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
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Evil is dull, that is the worst of it.
Katherine Anne Porter
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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
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Freedom, remember, is not the same as liberty.
Katherine Anne Porter
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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
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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