Mary Karr famous quotes

A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.
-- Mary Karr

#Family #Dysfunctional Family #Thanksgiving Day

Gary Shteyngart has written a memoir for the ages. I spat laughter on the first page and closed the last with wet eyes. Un-put-down-able in the day and a half I spent reading it, Little Failure is a window into immigrant agony and ambition, Jewish angst, and anybody's desperate need for a tribe. Readers who've fallen for Shteyngart's antics on the page will relish the trademark humor. But here it's laden and leavened with a deep, consequential, psychological journey. Brave and unflinching, Little Failure is his best book to date
-- Mary Karr

#Laughter #Book #Reading

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

#Morning #Loss #Moon

Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild...
-- Mary Karr

#Life #Kindness #Monsters

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

#Baby #Horse #Husband

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

#Blow #Hands #Air

Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.
-- Mary Karr

How much smaller the large places are once we're grown up, when we have car keys and credit cards.
-- Mary Karr

#Keys #Car #Credit

A pool game mixes ritual with geometry.
-- Mary Karr

#Games #Pool #Geometry

Memoir is not an act of history, but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.
-- Mary Karr

#Memories #Literature #Memoir

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

#Girl #Children #Yankees

If you live in the dark a long time and the sun comes out, you do not cross into it whistling. There's an initial uprush of relief at first, then-for me, anyway- a profound dislocation. My old assumptions about how the world works are buried, yet my new ones aren't yet operational.There's been a death of sorts, but without a few days in hell, no resurrection is possible.
-- Mary Karr

#Dark #Profound #Long

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

#Effort #Trying #World

I find a great deal of comfort and care in my faith and prayer. I'd sooner do without air than prayer.
-- Mary Karr

#Prayer #Air #Care

I've never contended that I had a really horrible life.
-- Mary Karr

#Horrible Life #Horrible

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

#Sibling #Mean #Kids

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

#Book #Healing #Body

I think we fall in love and become adults and become citizens in a way by writing stories about ourselves.
-- Mary Karr

#Falling In Love #Writing #Thinking

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

#Heart #World #Dull

I'm not nearly smart enough or imaginative enough to tackle the novel form. Never happen.
-- Mary Karr

#Smart #Enough #Form

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

#Moving #Kids #Feet

I kept the fingers of my left hand crossed all the time, while on my right-hand fingers I counted anything at all—steps to the refrigerator, seconds on the clock, words in a sentence—to keep my head occupied. The counting felt like something to hang on to, as if finding the right numbers might somehow crack the code on whatever system ran the slippery universe we were moving through.
-- Mary Karr

#Moving #Hands #Numbers

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

#Mother #Liars #Believe

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

#Rain #Boys #Wind

The Lesson You've Got to learn is the someday you'll someday stagger to, blinking in cold light, all tears shed, ready to poke your bovine head in the yoke they've shaped. Everyone learns this. Born, everyone breathes, pays tax, plants dead and hurts galore. There's grief enough for each. My mother learned by moving man to man, outlived them all. The parched earth's bare (once she leaves it) of any who watched the instants I trod it. Other than myself, of course. I've made a study of bearing and forbearance. Everyone does, it turns out, and note those faces passing by: Not one's a god.
-- Mary Karr

#Mother #Hurt #Grief

In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said.
-- Mary Karr

#Prayer #Sacred #Speech

I don't think I look like the pope's favorite Catholic - at least not under close scrutiny.
-- Mary Karr

#Thinking #Catholic #Looks

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

#Fighting #Thinking #Light

I'm doomed to act like myself, even when it's inconvenient!
-- Mary Karr

Love is the only passion which includes in its dreams the happiness of someone else.
-- Mary Karr

#Love #Dream #Witty

I tell people not to write too soon about their lives. Writing about yourself too young is loaded with psychological complexities.
-- Mary Karr

#Writing #People #Psychological

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

#Reading #Flip #Heroin

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

#Lines #Machines #Calm

Having a great dad probably permitted me to pal around with guys in a way that some women don't.
-- Mary Karr

#Dad #Guy #Way

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

#Memories #Mean #Numbers

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

#Family #Running #Teenager

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

#People #Suffering #Stuff

As a memoirist, I strive for veracity.
-- Mary Karr

#Strive

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

#Book #Healthy #Age

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

#Book #Profound #Degrees

Im always terrified when Im writing.
-- Mary Karr

#Writing

No road offers more mystery than that first one you mount from the town you were born to, the first time you mount it of your own volition, on a trip funded by your own coffee tin of wrinkled up dollars - bills you've saved and scrounged for, worked the all-night switchboard for, missed the Rolling Stones for, sold fragrant pot with smashed flowers going brown inside twist-tie plastic baggies for. In fact, to disembark from your origins, you've done everything you can think to scrounge money save selling your spanking young pussy.
-- Mary Karr

#Coffee #Flower #Night

For me, everything's too much and nothing's enough.
-- Mary Karr

#Too Much #Enough

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

#Thinking #Voice #Listening

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

#Husband #Wall #Lying

The shreiking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.
-- Mary Karr

#Character #Fighting #Water

The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold.
-- Mary Karr

#Character #Emotional #Giving

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

#Country #Emotional #Naps

Nobody sounds good writing about your divorce, let's face it.
-- Mary Karr

#Writing #Divorce #Faces

I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I'd been publishing for 20 years.
-- Mary Karr

#Years #Overnight Success #Publishing

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

#Inspire #Desire #Week

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

#Zero #Heart #Space

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

#Order #Years #Clothes

He never gave up on me, I only stopped being matriculated.
-- Mary Karr

#Gave Up

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

#Football #Boys #Play

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

#Passion #Community #Suffering

I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world.
-- Mary Karr

#Alternatives #World #Needs

Be willing to be a child and be the Lilliputian in the world of Gulliver.
-- Mary Karr

#Children #World #Gulliver

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

#Running #Wish #Might

I get so lonely sometimes, I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger.
-- Mary Karr

#Lonely #Mail #Sometimes

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

#Smart #School #Students

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

#Goodbye #Fun #Giving Up

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

#Real #Names #Smell

There are women succeeding beyond their wildest dreams because of their sobriety.
-- Mary Karr

#Inspirational #Dream #Sobriety