Katherine Anne Porter Quotes - Page 5

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• I don't believe in intuition. When you get sudden flashes of perception, it is just the brain working faster than usual. But you've been getting ready to know it for a long time, and when it comes, you feel you've known it always.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Believe, Long, Perception

  Katherine Anne Porter, Joan Givner (1987). “Katherine Anne Porter: Conversations”, p.90, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• advance money is really a delusion, that is to say, I get no more until it is paid out in sales, but still, living from hand to mouth and day to day as I do, a nickel in the hand is more useful than the same nickel next year. What do I know about next year? I've never been there. I don't know any one who has.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Future, Hands, Years

  Katherine Anne Porter, Isabel Bayley (1994). “Letters of Katherine Anne Porter”, p.370, Atlantic Monthly Press

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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

  Children, Book, House

  Katherine Anne Porter, Joan Givner (1987). “Katherine Anne Porter: Conversations”, p.79, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• words can never get at the truth.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Truth

  Katherine Anne Porter (2015). “Ship of Fools: A Novel”, p.120, Open Road Media

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• I work whenever I'm let.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Katherine Anne Porter, Joan Givner (1987). “Katherine Anne Porter: Conversations”, p.96, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• In this moment she felt that she had been robbed of an enormous number of valuable things, whether material or intangible: things lost or broken by her own fault, things she had forgotten and left in houses when she moved: books borrowed from her and not returned, journeys she had planned and had not made, words she had waited to hear spoken to her and had not heard, and the words she meant to answer with. . . .

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Book, Loss, Journey

  Katherine Anne Porter (2014). “Flowering Judas and Other Stories: A Library of America eBook Classic”, p.80, Library of America

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• I always write a story in one sitting.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Writing, Sitting, Stories

  Katherine Anne Porter, Joan Givner (1987). “Katherine Anne Porter: Conversations”, p.95, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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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

  Death, Mexican, Shadow

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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

  Mistake, Heart, Eye

  Katherine Anne Porter, Isabel Bayley (1994). “Letters of Katherine Anne Porter”, p.34, Atlantic Monthly Press

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• And yet, we know how fatal the pursuit of liveliness may be: it may result in ... tiresome acrobatics. ... Flashy effects distract the mind. They destroy their persuasiveness; you would not believe a man was very intent on ploughing a furrow if he carried a hoop with him and jumped through it at every other step. ... When virtuosity gets the upper hand of your theme, or is better than your idea, it is time to quit.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Believe, Men, Ideas

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• Could she fall so low? No, there were limits, and she believed she still knew where some of them were.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Fall, Limits, Lows

  Katherine Anne Porter (2015). “Ship of Fools: A Novel”, p.76, Open Road Media

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• I can pray better when I'm comfortable.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Praying, I Can, Comfortable

  Katherine Anne Porter, Joan Givner (1987). “Katherine Anne Porter: Conversations”, p.84, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Death always leaves one singer to mourn.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Death, Singers, Mourn

  Katherine Anne Porter (2008). “Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories & Other Writings”, p.386, Library of America

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• Every young artist has to do it one way, his [or her] way, and the hell with patterns. Remember who you are and where you are and what you are doing.... And never take advice, including this.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Artist, Advice, Creative

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• Even St. Teresa said, "I can pray better when I'm comfortable," and she refused to wear her haircloth shirt or starve herself. I don't think living in cellars and starving is better for an artist than it is for anybody else.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Artist, Thinking, Praying

  Katherine Anne Porter, Joan Givner (1987). “Katherine Anne Porter: Conversations”, p.84, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Writing does not exclude the full life; it demands it.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Writing, Doe, Demand

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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

  Giving, Suffering, Asceticism

  Katherine Anne Porter (2015). “Ship of Fools: A Novel”, p.359, Open Road Media

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• I was always restless, always a roving spirit. When I was a little child I was always running away. I never got very far, but they were always having to come and fetch me. Once when I was about six, my father came to get me somewhere I'd gone, and he told me later he'd asked me, "Why are you so restless? Why can't you stay here with us?" and I said to him, "I want to go and see the world. I want to know the world like the palm of my hand.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Running, Children, Father

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• I'm not afraid of life and I'm not afraid of death: Dying's the bore.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Dying, Afraid Of Life, Not Afraid

  The New York Times, April 03, 1970.

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• The human heart is not yet so corroded that it can read off the extinction of these two men without a shock to the very roots of its belief in justice and humanity.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Heart, Men, Two

  The Nation, August 31, 1927.

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• No man can be explained by his personal history, least of all a poet.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Men, Personal History, Poet

  Katherine Anne Porter (2008). “Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories & Other Writings”, p.781, Library of America

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• It is as hard to find a neutral critic as it is a neutral country in time of war. I suppose if a critic were neutral, he wouldn't trouble to write anything.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Country, War, Writing

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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

  Military, Should Have, Law

  Katherine Anne Porter, Darlene Harbour Unrue (2008). “Collected stories and other writings”

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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

  Art, Believe, Abuse

  Katherine Anne Porter, Joan Givner (1987). “Katherine Anne Porter: Conversations”, p.98, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• I have no patience with this dreadful idea that whatever you have in you has to come out, that you can't suppress true talent. People can be destroyed; they can be bent, distorted, and completely crippled. In spite of all the poetry, all the philosophy to the contrary, we are not really masters of our fate.

  Katherine Anne Porter

  Philosophy, Fate, Ideas

  "Silences". Book by Tillie Olsen, 2014.

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