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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.

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
Learn
Fundamental
Facts
Prejudice
Two
Absolutes
World
Fundamentals
People
Absolute
Rest
Bits
Knowledge
Decoration

More quotes by Katherine Anne Porter

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The past is never where you think you left it.
Katherine Anne Porter
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It is such a relief to be told the truth.
Katherine Anne Porter
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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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There seems to be a kind of order in the universe…in the movement of the stars and the turning of the Earth and the changing of the seasons. But human life is almost pure chaos. Everyone takes his stance, asserts his own right and feelings, mistaking the motives of others, and his own.
Katherine Anne Porter
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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.
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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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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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
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We are born knowing death.
Katherine Anne Porter
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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
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It's a man's world, and you men can have it.
Katherine Anne Porter
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Death always leaves one singer to mourn.
Katherine Anne Porter
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Religion put claws on Aunt Sally and gave her a post to whet them on.
Katherine Anne Porter
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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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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.
Katherine Anne Porter
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[Marriage] is the merciless revealer, the great white searchlight turned on the darkest places of human nature.
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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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
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I work whenever I'm let.
Katherine Anne Porter
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I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction.
Katherine Anne Porter