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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.

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
Evil
Virtuous
Government
Governments
Come
Cruelty
Cruelties
Done
Expected
Destroyer
Great
Committed
Appalling
Good
Expectations
Destroyers
Never
Learning
Expectation
Sure
Apparently

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I do not understand the world, but I watch it's progress.
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Death always leaves one singer to mourn.
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Education must be taken out of the hands of rich illiterates, third rate politicians, and put where it belongs: in the care of scholars. At present the whole University system is rotten to the core, and an appalling waste of time, energy and money.
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We are born knowing death.
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Be respectful of words. They mean something.
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It's a man's world, and you men can have it.
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Evil is dull, that is the worst of it.
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One little human truth is that opinionated people don't hold much with other people's opinions, and it is a great pleasure to some of them to be able to ascribe incurable defects, such as belonging to a certain sex or base motives, or lack of understanding, to anyone whose views they disagree with.
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The greatest art comes out of warmth and conviction and deep feeling, but then, very few people, even geniuses, have all that.
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Miracles are instantaneous, they cannot be summoned, but come of themselves, usually at unlikely moments and to those who least expect them.
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The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one's own.
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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.
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There is no such thing as an exact synonym and no such thing as an unmixed motive.
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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.
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The nose is surely one of the most impressionable, if not positively erotic, of all our unruly members.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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