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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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Katherine Anne Porter
Age: 90 †
Born: 1890
Born: May 15
Died: 1980
Died: September 18
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Indian Creek
Texas
World
Standards
Dilute
People
Meet
Colleges
College
Absorb
Already
Crowded
Education
Mistaken
Everybody
Standard
Everything
Lows
Never
Notion
Rudimentary

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Evil is dull, that is the worst of it.
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You waste life when you waste good food.
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I get so tired of moral bookkeeping.
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There has been a marvelous joyous carnival of mourning for Edith Piaf and Jean Coctaeau, and it was real! They died as they had lived, with style and grace and their proper eccentricity and Paris loves anybody who can live anarchically and be delightful entertainment at the same time. So do I.
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Death is loneliness in its purest form.
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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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The nose is surely one of the most impressionable, if not positively erotic, of all our unruly members.
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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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I always write a story in one sitting.
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Love is purely a creation of the human imagination, it is merely perhaps the most important of all the examples of how the imagination continually outruns the creature it inhabits.
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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.
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The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one's own.
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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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We pity people too often for the wrong reasons.
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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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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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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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It is such a relief to be told the truth.
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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