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I specialize in what the French call la petite histoire. I am interested in the individual thumbprint.

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
Thumbprint
Thumbprints
Specialize
Petite
French
Interested
Call
Individual

More quotes by 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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If I didn't know the ending of a story, I wouldn't begin. I always write my last lines, my last paragraph first, and then I go back and work towards it. I know where I'm going. I know what my goal is. And how I get there is God's grace.
Katherine Anne Porter
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It's a man's world, and you men can have it.
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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.
Katherine Anne Porter
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Writing does not exclude the full life it demands it.
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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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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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.
Katherine Anne Porter
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Death is loneliness in its purest form.
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Death always leaves one singer to mourn.
Katherine Anne Porter
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we know that the Furies do not come uninvited.
Katherine Anne Porter
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Death cancels our engagements, but it does not affect the consequences of our acts in life.
Katherine Anne Porter
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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.
Katherine Anne Porter
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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.
Katherine Anne Porter
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I get so tired of moral bookkeeping.
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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Physical infidelity is the signal, the notice given, that all fidelities are undermined.
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
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I always write a story in one sitting.
Katherine Anne Porter
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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.
Katherine Anne Porter