Quote

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

More quotes by Katherine Anne Porter

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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.
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Religion put claws on Aunt Sally and gave her a post to whet them on.
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It is such a relief to be told the truth.
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Death always leaves one singer to mourn.
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I get so tired of moral bookkeeping.
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I specialize in what the French call la petite histoire. I am interested in the individual thumbprint.
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I always write a story in one sitting.
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We pity people too often for the wrong reasons.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Death is loneliness in its purest form.
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we do know now, all of us, that the most appalling cruelties are committed by apparently virtuous governments in expectation of a great good to come, never learning that the evil done now is the sure destroyer of the expected good.
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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.
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I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.
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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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.
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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
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You waste life when you waste good food.
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