Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Mary Karr, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Mary Karr quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 166 Mary Karr quotes for you to read and share.

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Any time you try to collapse the distance between your delusions about the past and what really happened, there is suffering involved."
p. xx -- Mary Karr
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Every reporter who came up in legacy media can tell you about a come-to-Jesus moment when an editor put them up against a wall and tattooed a message deep into their skull: show respect for the fundamentals of the craft, or you would not soon be part of it. -- Mary Karr
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Every now and then we enter the presence of the numinous and deduce for an instant how we're formed, in what detail the force that infuses every petal might specifically run through us, wishing only to lure us into our full potential. -- Mary Karr
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I do have a really good memory. I mean, like, I can remember all the phone numbers of everybody on the street I grew up on. -- Mary Karr
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Success has affected my self-definition in that I have more money. Writers pooh-pooh that idea, but it's a huge deal. -- Mary Karr
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Metaphorically speaking, I always make room for any evidence of scurvy in my characters, any mitigating ailments. -- Mary Karr
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Most great writers suffer and have no idea how good they are. Most bad writers are very confident. Be willing to be a child and be the Lilliputian in the world of Gulliver, the bat girl in Yankee Stadium. That's a more fruitful way to be. -- Mary Karr
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Real You is all you have, and all other paths are false. And in the best case, Real You is so happy to finally be recognized, it rewards you with Originality. -- Mary Karr
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Young writers often mistakenly choose a certain vein or style based on who they want to be, unconsciously trying to blot out who they actually are. You want to escape yourself. -- Mary Karr
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The shreiking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water. -- Mary Karr
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Unless you're a doubter and a worrier, a nail-biter, an apologizer, a rethinker, then memoir may not be your playpen. That's the quality I've found most consistently in those life-story writers I've met. -- Mary Karr
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The editor self thinks only of saving the reader time and shaping a powerful emotional experience. -- Mary Karr
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Having a great dad probably permitted me to pal around with guys in a way that some women don't. -- Mary Karr
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Mother's particular devils had remained mysterious to me for decades. So had her past. Few born liars ever intentionally embark in truth's direction, even those who believe that such a journey might axiomatically set them free. -- Mary Karr
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Your mother rolls her eyes at the cat lapping grapefruit juice, says, Everything that comes into this house is crazy - whether we choose them for that or they get that way, I don't know. -- Mary Karr
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We are in the grip of some big machine grinding us along. The force of it simplifies everything. A weird calm settled over me from inside out. What is about to happen has stood in line to happen. All the roads out of that instant have been closed, one by one. -- Mary Karr
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When you do try to picture the boys who do ask you out, they're absolutely featureless, like old carvings eroded by centuries of rain and wind. -- Mary Karr
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Her parents roared around in the masks of monsters. Not -- Mary Karr
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The changes are coming fast and blind now, and in your skull sits an hourglass with a grain size hole through which numb seconds are sliding. -- Mary Karr
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None of us can ever know the value of our lives, or how our separate and silent scribbling may add to the amenity of the world, if only by how radically it changes us, one and by one. -- Mary Karr
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Be willing to be a child and be the Lilliputian in the world of Gulliver. -- Mary Karr
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When people suffer, their relationships usually suffer as well. Period. And we all suffer because, as the Buddha says, that's the nature of being human and wanting stuff we don't always get. -- Mary Karr
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Slurping these spirits is soul preparation, a warped communion, myself serving as god, priest, and congregation. -- Mary Karr
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I'd spent way more years worrying about how to look like a poet
buying black clothes, smearing on scarlet lipstick, languidly draping myself over thrift-store furniture
than I had learning how to assemble words in some discernible order. -- Mary Karr
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Childhood was terrifying for me. A kid has no control. You're three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, and illiterate. Terror snaps you awake. You pay keen attention. People can just pick you up and move you and put you down. -- Mary Karr
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Others can't stand to revise; instead they decide they're avant-garde, so everybody who doesn't like their work is unenlightened. (Note: being avant-garde is now ... well, garde.) -- Mary Karr
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When you've been hurt enough as a kid (maybe at any age), it's like you have a trick knee. Most of your life, you can function like an adult, but add in the right portions of sleeplessness and stress and grief, and the hurt, defeated self can bloom into place. -- Mary Karr
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On a piece of prose, you have to work at least six hours a day. I don't know how you can do that and teach and raise a kid and paint the house. -- Mary Karr
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For me, everything's too much and nothing's enough. -- Mary Karr
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Writing about prayer to a secular audience is tap-dancing on the radio. I want to say, 'Gee whiz, isn't this great,' and have everyone's head cocked like the RCA dog. -- Mary Karr
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I've plumb forgot where I am for the instant, which is how a good lie should take you. At the same time, I'm more where I was inside myself than before Daddy started talking, which is how lies can tell you the truth. -- Mary Karr
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It strikes me that whatever advantages there are to being a boy
getting to stay out late and having other people wash your clothes and bring you plates of stuff
get undercut by having to play football. -- Mary Karr
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I once heard Don DeLillo quip that a fiction writer starts with meaning and then manufactures events to represent it; a memoirist starts with events, then derives meaning from them. -- Mary Karr
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The week the local paper carried a story about the boy's incarceration and lobotomy in the state hospital at Rusk, the guys at the refinery pitched the kid's daddy a party complete with balloons and noisemakers. -- Mary Karr
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I don't have a copy of my books, and the degree to which I never read them is profound. I never look. -- Mary Karr
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Dumb hope is what it hurts most to write, occupying the foolish schemes we pursued for decades, the blind alleys, the cliffs we stepped off. -- Mary Karr
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I threw away over 1,200 finished pages of my last memoir and broke the delete key on my keyboard changing my mind. If I had any balls at all, I'd make a brooch out of it. -- Mary Karr
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It was dawning on me how uphill a poet's path was, and I confessed to her that if I had to be the choice between being happy or being a poet, I'd choose to be happy. -- Mary Karr
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Ten years, she's dead, and I still find myself some mornings reaching for the phone to call her. She could no more be gone than gravity or the moon. -- Mary Karr
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It's hard to be an articulate ghost. -- Mary Karr
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But I'm not ready to stop listening to the screwed-up inner voice that's been ordering me around for a lifetime. My head thinks it can kill me ... and go on living without me. -- Mary Karr
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The image pleases me enough : to slip from the body's tight container and into some luminous womb, gliding there without effort till the distant shapes glow brighter and more familiar, till all your beloveds hover before you, their lit arms held out in welcome. -- Mary Karr
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A hawk reeled overhead with a rodent squirming in its beak, close enough so you could see the bird's black shiny eyes. -- Mary Karr
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Having devoted the first half of my life to the dark, I feel obliged to rever any pinpoint of light now. -- Mary Karr
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No writer can impose his own standards onto any other, nor claim to speak for the whole genre. -- Mary Karr
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There are women succeeding beyond their wildest dreams because of their sobriety. -- Mary Karr
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People who didn't live pre-Internet can't grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. The only bookstores sold Bibles the size of coffee tables and dashboard Virgin Marys that glowed in the dark. -- Mary Karr
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If dysfunction means that a family doesn't work, then every family ambles into some arena in which that happens, where relationships get strained or even break down entirely. We fail each other or disappoint each other. That goes for parents, siblings, kids, marriage partners - the whole enchilada. -- Mary Karr
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Faith is not a feeling, she says. It's a set of actions. By taking the actions, you demonstrate more faith than somebody who actually has experienced the rewards of prayer and so feels hope. -- Mary Karr
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The head can travel a far piece while the body sits in one spot. It can traverse many decades, and many conversations can be had, even with the dead. -- Mary Karr
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Tomorrow! How sweet its prospects for a drunkard the night before. There is no better word. Before the earth hurls itself into sunshine, nothing is not possible. -- Mary Karr
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What hurts so bad about youth isn't the actual butt whippings the world delivers. It's the stupid hopes playacting like certainties. -- Mary Karr
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The memoirist's job is not to add explosive whammies on every page, but to help the average person come in. -- Mary Karr
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Your heart, Mary Karr, he'd say. His pen touched my sternum, and it felt for all the world like the point of a dull spear as he said, Your heart knows what your head don't. Or won't. -- Mary Karr
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I have a completely addictive personality. Diet Coke is my last - God, I know people counting days off Diet Coke; I'm such a Diet Cokehead. Now I won't let myself buy it. -- Mary Karr
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Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards. -- Mary Karr
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That's what's so gorgeous about humanity. It doesn't matter how bleak our daily lives are, we still fight for the light. I think that's our divinity. We lean into love, even in the most hideous circumstances. We manage to hope. -- Mary Karr
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I think we fall in love and become adults and become citizens in a way by writing stories about ourselves. -- Mary Karr
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There's a space at the bottom of an exhale, a little hitch between taking in and letting out that's a perfect zero you can go into. There's a rest point between the heart muscle's close and open - an instant of keenest living when you're momentarily dead. You can rest there. -- Mary Karr
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Age about 30, I stopped looking up my books in bookstores. Paying attention to the marketplace isn't a healthy thing for me. -- Mary Karr
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I believe in God, but even if you don't, you can believe in a self, the person who is innately who you are. Once you fully become that person, then everything you do will be blessed. -- Mary Karr
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The first night he slept with her, he took a washrag and a jug of wood alcohol to get rid of her makeup, saying he wanted to know what he was getting into. -- Mary Karr
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Most kids bent their heads onto their notebooks and tried to sleep. One boy gauged the quality of his day by sleeping on graph paper, then drawing a circle around the drool spot he'd made and comparing it for size and integrity to his drool spot from the day before. For -- Mary Karr
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When I got sober, I thought giving up was saying goodbye to all the fun and all the sparkle, and it turned out to be just the opposite. That's when the sparkle started for me. -- Mary Karr
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Reading is socially accepted disassociation. You flip a switch and you're not there anymore. It's better than heroin. More effective and cheaper and legal. -- Mary Karr
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It's completely through prayer that I came to believe in God. I just sensed a presence south of my neck. -- Mary Karr
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As a memoirist, I strive for veracity. -- Mary Karr
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I revise and revise and revise. Any editor of mine will tell you how crappy my early drafts are. Revisions are about clarifying and evoking feelings in the reader in the same way they were once evoked in me. -- Mary Karr
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Patti proposes that I pray to accept whatever reality I'm in, staying alert for practical solutions rather than issuing orders in prayer. It takes discipline to stop beseeching the heavens for wheelbarrows of gold -- Mary Karr
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I don't think I look like the pope's favorite Catholic - at least not under close scrutiny. -- Mary Karr
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I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I'd been publishing for 20 years. -- Mary Karr
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The words and sentences you take into your body from books are no less sacred and healing than communion. Surely at least one such person lives in your zip code. -- Mary Karr
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Most morally ominous: from the second you choose one event over another, you're shaping the past's meaning. -- Mary Karr
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Asking me how to write a memoir is a little like saying, "I really want to have sex, where do I start?" What one person fantasizes about would ruin the romance for another. -- Mary Karr
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But it's a neurological fact that the scared self holds on while the reasoned one lets go. -- Mary Karr
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The truth is when I went to graduate school I would've said I was among the least talented of the students, I was certainly the least smart, or less educated. But I worked very hard. -- Mary Karr
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(Later, I'l learn that's the structure of an elegy: lament, consolation; bad news, followed by good news.) -- Mary Karr
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I've been teaching classes on memoirs since 1986, and I've been reading them all my life, and I think that I would like to write a critical book that might have some of those how-to elements in it. -- Mary Karr
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Joy, it is, which I've never known before, only pleasure or excitement. Joy is a different thing, because its focus exists outside the self-delight in something external, not satisfaction of some inner craving. -- Mary Karr
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Which ensures that life gets lived in miniature. In lieu of the large feelings - sorrow, fury, joy - I had their junior counterparts - anxiety, irritation, excitement. But -- Mary Karr
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I'm bred for farm work, and for such folk, the only A's you get come from effort. Strife and strain are all the world can offer, and they temper you into something unbreakable because Lord knows they'll try
without let up
to break you. -- Mary Karr
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The trick in that town was getting through a night at all without stalling in the sludge of your own thoughts. -- Mary Karr
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The thing I have to do as a writer, and that God permits me to do, is that I have to be willing to fail. -- Mary Karr
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She holds every dress briefly by its shoulders like it's a schoolkid she's checking out for smudges before church. Then one by one they get flung away from her and into the fire. -- Mary Karr
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Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else's suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take communion, you make a community with others. -- Mary Karr
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Unless you're like my friend, poet Brooks Haxton (who translates Greek, Latin, French, Hebrew, and German), throwing in three-dollar words will just make you look like a dick. -- Mary Karr
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I'm always astonished by the confidence my readers put in me. -- Mary Karr
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He never gave up on me, I only stopped being matriculated. -- Mary Karr
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Whether you're a memoirist or not, there's a psychic cost for lopping yourself off from the past: -- Mary Karr
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Nothing matters but the quality of the affection - in the end - that has carved the trace in the mind dove -- Mary Karr
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A pool game mixes ritual with geometry. -- Mary Karr
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At some point the talk got heated, and Paolo called Mother a strumpet, for which Daddy was said to have stomped a serious mudhole in Paolo's ass. -- Mary Karr
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His silence hadn't been helplessness - it hadn't even been love. It had been pity. -- Mary Karr
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Truth works a trip wire that permits the book to explode into being. -- Mary Karr
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I think about the story of Job I heard in Carol Sharp's Sunday school. How he sort of learned to lean into feeling hurt at the end, the way you might lean into a heavy wind that almost winds up supporting you after a while. -- Mary Karr
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The American religion-so far as there is one anymore-seems to be doubt. Whoever believes the least wins, because he'll never be found wrong. -- Mary Karr
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I was a philosophy major as an undergraduate, and I'm just an arrogant little thing. It's hard for me to admit that I can't understand something, let alone not be in charge of it. -- Mary Karr
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I couldn't have been more than six, but I was calling her an ignorant little bitch. Her momma stood on the porch step shaking her mop at me and saying there were snakes and lizards coming out of my mouth, to which I said i didn't give a shit. -- Mary Karr
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Sentimentality is only emotion you haven't proven to the reader - emotion without vivid evidence. -- Mary Karr
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Those are only rumors of suffering. Real suffering has a face and a smell. It lasts in the most intense form no matter what you drape over it. And it knows your name. -- Mary Karr
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I get so lonely sometimes, I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger. -- Mary Karr
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How much smaller the large places are once we're grown up, when we have car keys and credit cards. -- Mary Karr
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Born on third base, my daddy always said of the well off, and they think they hit a home run. -- Mary Karr
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Faith is a choice like any other. If you're picking a career or a husband - or deciding whether to have a baby - there are feelings and reasons pro and con out the wazoo. But thinking it through is - at the final hour - horse dookey. You can only try out. -- Mary Karr
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If you let yourself tell those smaller anecdotes or stories, the overarching capital-S Story will eventually rise into view. -- Mary Karr
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For days on end, I avoid the Web, never logging in until about two or three, after I've written all morning. On a good week, I don't go online till after Wednesday, so four or five days might lapse without my checking e-mail. -- Mary Karr
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Being smart and rich are lucky, but being curious and compassionate will save your ass. Being curious and compassionate can take you out of your ego and edge your soul towards wonder. -- Mary Karr
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A university is a city of ideas, and we're grateful you became citizens of our city. -- Mary Karr
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Put your mind where your body is. One day at a time forces you to reckon with the instant you actually occupy, rather than living in fantasy la-la that never comes. -- Mary Karr
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My idea of art is, you write something that makes people feel so strongly that they get some conviction about who they want to be or what they want to do. It's morally useful not in a political way, but it makes your heart bigger; it's emotionally and spiritually empowering. -- Mary Karr
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I loved the idea that looking at a painting or listening to a concerto could make you somehow "transcend" the day-in, day-out bullshit that grinds you down: how in one instant of pure attention you could draw something inside that made you forever larger -- Mary Karr
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Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time. -- Mary Karr
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If your goal is to polish up a fake person you can sell to a public you perceive as dumb, the unexamined life will do perfectly well, thank you. -- Mary Karr
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Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild ... -- Mary Karr
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If you lie to your husband - even about something so banal as how much you drink - each lie is a brick in a wall going up between you, and when he tells you he loves you, it's deflected away. -- Mary Karr
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We're not made to wallow in pleasure. Pleasure is joy's assassin. -- Mary Karr
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Life is a field of corn. Literature is the shot glass it distills down into. Lorrie Moore -- Mary Karr
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The audiobooks I buy are never first-time reads - only rereadings of books I know well that I find intoxicating. -- Mary Karr
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A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it. -- Mary Karr
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Our strange cynicism about truth as a possibility has permitted us to accept all manner of bullshit -- Mary Karr
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The fact that my house was Not Right metastasized into the notion that I myself was somehow Not Right, or that my survival in the world depended on my constant vigilance against various forms of Not-Rightness. -- Mary Karr
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I'm always terrified when I'm writing. -- Mary Karr
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Writing, regardless of the end result - whether good or bad, published or not, well reviewed or slammed - means celebrating beauty in an often ugly world. -- Mary Karr
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Most of the people I write about I'm still in touch with, so I would be loath to make up stuff about them. -- Mary Karr
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I'm doomed to act like myself, even when it's inconvenient! -- Mary Karr
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The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold. -- Mary Karr
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I exhale a highway of smoke and stare down it, then say, Each day has just been survival, just getting through, standing it.
Don't you see how savage that sounds? Like, that's the way men in prison yards think. You live in a rich suburb and teach literature. -- Mary Karr
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I think the problem with visual media like TV is that they're reductive. -- Mary Karr
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The first day of school, we walked till we reached a stretch of black graffiti on the sidewalk. Somebody named Ken blew dead bears, it said. -- Mary Karr
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I'm not nearly smart enough or imaginative enough to tackle the novel form. Never happen. -- Mary Karr
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Every writer needs two selves - the generative self and the editor self. -- Mary Karr
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KIDS IN DISTRESSED FAMILIES ARE GREAT repositories of silence and carry in their bodies whole arctic wastelands of words not to be uttered, stories not to be told. -- Mary Karr
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I lock all my scaredness down in my stomach until the fear hardens into something I hardly notice. I myself harden into a person that I hardly notice. -- Mary Karr
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Daddy said a Republican was somebody who couldn't enjoy eating unless he knew somebody else was hungry, -- Mary Karr
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I find a great deal of comfort and care in my faith and prayer. I'd sooner do without air than prayer. -- Mary Karr
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As novelist Harry Crews once wrote, I'm the kind of person who - if he can't have too much of something - doesn't want any of it. In -- Mary Karr
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Standing in the shower, I feel something on the back of my leg that turns out to be my ass. -- Mary Karr
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One can't mount a stripper pole wearing a metal diving suit. -- Mary Karr
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In those days, I still enjoyed a child's desperate tendency to put sparkles on my whole tribe. -- Mary Karr
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He was so proud that she had more going on north of her neck than her hairdo. -- Mary Karr
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I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world. -- Mary Karr
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It turned out to be impossible for me to 'run away' in the sense other American teenagers did. Any movement at all was taken for progress in my family. -- Mary Karr
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(Who but a drunk, I wonder looking back, could sit on the porch alone and get in an argument?) -- Mary Karr
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It was a feminist act, revealing secrets in order to free herself and the women of her clan from the silence and obscurity to which a misogyny thousands of years old would have relegated them. -- Mary Karr
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Memoir done right is an art, a made thing. It's not just raw reportage flung splat on the page. -- Mary Karr
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I get about five memoirs per week in my mailbox, and few of them inspire anything but a desire to pick up the channel changer. -- Mary Karr
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She was set on enduring, no matter what.she'd harden into whatever shape survival required.from that second forward, she had to figure what-all she'd have to lose for that survival, what-all and who. -- Mary Karr
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To my mind, a small bit of catshit equals a catshit sandwich, unless I know where the catshit is and can eat around it. -- Mary Karr
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In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech
the only prayers said. -- Mary Karr
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Was behind in every conceivable way. So the old attack dog started howling through my head as I'd -- Mary Karr
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You are loved, someone said. Take that and eat it. -- Mary Karr
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Writing the real self seldom seems original enough when you first happen on it. -- Mary Karr
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Nobody sounds good writing about your divorce, let's face it. -- Mary Karr
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What would you write if you weren't afraid? -- Mary Karr
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Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt. -- Mary Karr
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Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it. -- Mary Karr
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I tell people not to write too soon about their lives. Writing about yourself too young is loaded with psychological complexities. -- Mary Karr
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Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But it could blow everybody's head off. -- Mary Karr
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I always thought my family was so bizarre, so when people started coming up to me and saying, 'My family was exactly like yours,' I was completely knocked out. -- Mary Karr
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Comfort makes fools of us that way, and a kid gets faith back quick. -- Mary Karr
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I've said it's hard. Here's how hard: everybody I know who wades deep enough into memory's waters drowns a little. -- Mary Karr
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The emotional stakes a memoirist bets with could not be higher, and it's physically enervating. I nap on a daily basis like a cross-country trucker. -- Mary Karr
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I've never contended that I had a really horrible life. -- Mary Karr
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Poetry privileges music and is aesthetically more challenging. Prose privileges information and is emotionally more challenging. -- Mary Karr
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There are all kinds of things God wants me to do that I'm very obstreperous about. -- Mary Karr
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They feed us the way the bread of communion does, with a nourishment that seems to form new flesh. According -- Mary Karr