Top 100 Karr Quotes
#1. Janice rolled her eyes. First, the doctor had ogled her, and now Karr was leering at her and licking his lips lasciviously.
Oh this is great. I'm being mentally undressed by a space pirate.
William L. Lavell
#2. Begging for More Kim Karr It was an instant attraction ... never intended to be more than a quick lay.
Alessandra Torre
#3. Rnesh karr slithis, I hissed back, which was Draconic for eat your own tail, the dragon version of go screw yourself. No extra translation needed.
Julie Kagawa
#4. There is great truth in Alphonse Karr's remark that modern men are ugly because they do not wear their beards.
George Augustus Henry Sala
#5. 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
#6. Friendship between two women is always a plot against another one.
Alphonse Karr
#7. 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
#8. I'd choked back so many tears, they'd become a lake of sadness in my belly.
Julia Karr
#9. The editor self thinks only of saving the reader time and shaping a powerful emotional experience.
Mary Karr
#10. I'm doomed to act like myself, even when it's inconvenient!
Mary Karr
#11. 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
#12. He feels so real. He's what I crave. He's what I want. He makes me feel alive.
Kim Karr
#13. Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.
Mary Karr
#14. There's nothing to see through. Feel this." His lips skim down my neck. "This is me." He presses his body to mine. "All of me." His voice is low and seductive.
Kim Karr
#15. 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
#16. Some people grumble that roses have thorns; I am grateful that thorns have roses.
Alphonse Karr
#17. You are loved, someone said. Take that and eat it.
Mary Karr
#18. 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
#19. Metaphorically speaking, I always make room for any evidence of scurvy in my characters, any mitigating ailments.
Mary Karr
#20. Daddy said a Republican was somebody who couldn't enjoy eating unless he knew somebody else was hungry,
Mary Karr
#21. 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
#22. One can't mount a stripper pole wearing a metal diving suit.
Mary Karr
#23. Standing in the shower, I feel something on the back of my leg that turns out to be my ass.
Mary Karr
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. Was behind in every conceivable way. So the old attack dog started howling through my head as I'd
Mary Karr
#28. As a memoirist, I strive for veracity.
Mary Karr
#29. Writing the real self seldom seems original enough when you first happen on it.
Mary Karr
#30. If you let yourself tell those smaller anecdotes or stories, the overarching capital-S Story will eventually rise into view.
Mary Karr
#31. As he pushes aside a piece of my hair, tucking it behind my ear, he seductively whispers, "Dahlia, I want you. I want to kiss you, touch you, make you come over and over again. I've never wanted anyone as much as I want you
Kim Karr
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. If men knew all that women think, they would be twenty times more audacious.
Alphonse Karr
#35. What would you write if you weren't afraid?
Mary Karr
#36. Dress is the great business of all women, and the fixed idea of some.
Alphonse Karr
#37. 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
#38. Nobody sounds good writing about your divorce, let's face it.
Mary Karr
#39. 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
#40. I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I'd been publishing for 20 years.
Mary Karr
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. Avoid all haste; calmness is an essential ingredient of politeness.
Alphonse Karr
#47. His silence hadn't been helplessness - it hadn't even been love. It had been pity.
Mary Karr
#48. 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
#49. Botany is the art of insulting flowers in Greek and Latin.
Alphonse Karr
#50. Ever since I met you, no one else has been worth thinking about.
Kim Karr
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. The shreiking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.
Mary Karr
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. A woman who writes commits two sins; she increases the number of books, and decreases the number of women.
Alphonse Karr
#60. He never gave up on me, I only stopped being matriculated.
Mary Karr
#61. A university is a city of ideas, and we're grateful you became citizens of our city.
Mary Karr
#62. I'm always astonished by the confidence my readers put in me.
Mary Karr
#63. Having devoted the first half of my life to the dark, I feel obliged to rever any pinpoint of light now.
Mary Karr
#64. One expresses well only the love he does not feel.
Alphonse Karr
#65. I do not believe in any wise man until I have heard him say << I doubt it>> three times and << I don't know >> two times.
Alphonse Karr
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. Don't leave me," I yell as he walks down the path leading to another life.
Turning and glancing at me over his shoulder, his eyes are no longer gleaming their perfect shade of green; they're cloudy, hazy even. "I'm not," he says as he keeps walking. "You left me, beautiful girl.
Kim Karr
#69. 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
#70. Memoir done right is an art, a made thing. It's not just raw reportage flung splat on the page.
Mary Karr
#71. I feel alive again - living, breathing, and experiencing life like I never had before - because of him. He took me to places within my body and my soul I've never been, and I wanted to discover more.
Kim Karr
#72. Sometimes in the dark of the night we see what we want, wish for things that can never be, have hope we shouldn't.
Kim Karr
#73. 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
#74. Slurping these spirits is soul preparation, a warped communion, myself serving as god, priest, and congregation.
Mary Karr
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. Every man has three characters - that which he exhibits, that which he has, and that which he thinks he has.
Alphonse Karr
#79. Flowing water is at once a picture and a music, which causes to flow at the same time from my brain, like a limpid and murmuring rivulet, sweet thoughts, charming reveries, and melancholy remembrances.
Alphonse Karr
#80. Women's glances express what they dare not speak.
Alphonse Karr
#81. 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
#82. I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world.
Mary Karr
#83. Religion seemed to me like one group of people telling another group that their color of red was the best. And that everyone had to believe that, or else.
Julia Karr
#84. I think we fall in love and become adults and become citizens in a way by writing stories about ourselves.
Mary Karr
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech
the only prayers said.
Mary Karr
#88. I couldn't shake the impulse to help him. It seemed that the older I got the more I believed that everyone, homeless or not, deserved to be treated at least like a human.
Julia Karr
#89. 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
#90. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. That line between love and lust was thin as a whisper.
Julia Karr
#95. No writer can impose his own standards onto any other, nor claim to speak for the whole genre.
Mary Karr
#96. 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
#97. Life is a field of corn. Literature is the shot glass it distills down into. Lorrie Moore
Mary Karr
#98. To women who think they're all that, may their boobs drop at a young age.
Kim Karr
#99. 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
#100. 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
