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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
Everything
Lows
Never
Notion
Rudimentary
World
Standards
Dilute
People
Meet
Colleges
College
Absorb
Already
Crowded
Education
Mistaken
Everybody
Standard

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Freedom, remember, is not the same as liberty.
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Physical infidelity is the signal, the notice given, that all fidelities are undermined.
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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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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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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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One of the marks of a gift is to have the courage of it.
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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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I do not understand the world, but I watch it's progress.
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I get so tired of moral bookkeeping.
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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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. . . all that she had had, and all that she had missed, were lost together, and were twice lost in this landslide of remembered losses.
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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.
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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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Death is loneliness in its purest form.
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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?
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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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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.
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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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Mexican writer and diplomat, Pasado en claro (A Draft of Shadows) You learn something the day you die. You learn how to die.
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With the most infinite tenderness I have ever known in my life, he put his arms around me, gently, gently, and I embraced him around the neck, and we touched.
Katherine Anne Porter