Top 100 Karr's 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. Friendship between two women is always a plot against another one.
Alphonse Karr
#3. 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
#4. I'd choked back so many tears, they'd become a lake of sadness in my belly.
Julia Karr
#5. The editor self thinks only of saving the reader time and shaping a powerful emotional experience.
Mary Karr
#6. I'm doomed to act like myself, even when it's inconvenient!
Mary Karr
#7. 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
#8. He feels so real. He's what I crave. He's what I want. He makes me feel alive.
Kim Karr
#9. Begging for More Kim Karr It was an instant attraction ... never intended to be more than a quick lay.
Alessandra Torre
#10. Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.
Mary Karr
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. Some people grumble that roses have thorns; I am grateful that thorns have roses.
Alphonse Karr
#14. You are loved, someone said. Take that and eat it.
Mary Karr
#15. 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
#16. Metaphorically speaking, I always make room for any evidence of scurvy in my characters, any mitigating ailments.
Mary Karr
#17. Daddy said a Republican was somebody who couldn't enjoy eating unless he knew somebody else was hungry,
Mary Karr
#18. 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
#19. One can't mount a stripper pole wearing a metal diving suit.
Mary Karr
#20. Standing in the shower, I feel something on the back of my leg that turns out to be my ass.
Mary Karr
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. Was behind in every conceivable way. So the old attack dog started howling through my head as I'd
Mary Karr
#25. As a memoirist, I strive for veracity.
Mary Karr
#26. Writing the real self seldom seems original enough when you first happen on it.
Mary Karr
#27. If you let yourself tell those smaller anecdotes or stories, the overarching capital-S Story will eventually rise into view.
Mary Karr
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. If men knew all that women think, they would be twenty times more audacious.
Alphonse Karr
#32. What would you write if you weren't afraid?
Mary Karr
#33. Dress is the great business of all women, and the fixed idea of some.
Alphonse Karr
#34. 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
#35. Nobody sounds good writing about your divorce, let's face it.
Mary Karr
#36. 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
#37. I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I'd been publishing for 20 years.
Mary Karr
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. Avoid all haste; calmness is an essential ingredient of politeness.
Alphonse Karr
#45. His silence hadn't been helplessness - it hadn't even been love. It had been pity.
Mary Karr
#46. 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
#47. Botany is the art of insulting flowers in Greek and Latin.
Alphonse Karr
#48. Ever since I met you, no one else has been worth thinking about.
Kim Karr
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. The shreiking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.
Mary Karr
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. A woman who writes commits two sins; she increases the number of books, and decreases the number of women.
Alphonse Karr
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. Memoir done right is an art, a made thing. It's not just raw reportage flung splat on the page.
Mary Karr
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. Women's glances express what they dare not speak.
Alphonse Karr
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. His hold is tight, our fingers are laced, and he's occasionally rubbing circles on the top of my hand with his thumb. These small gestures definitely make handholding seem more like an art.
Kim Karr
#70. 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
#71. It's your body, we'll go slow if you want or as hard as you want.
Kim Karr
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. The memoirist's job is not to add explosive whammies on every page, but to help the average person come in.
Mary Karr
#77. (Later, I'l learn that's the structure of an elegy: lament, consolation; bad news, followed by good news.)
Mary Karr
#78. 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
#79. But it's a neurological fact that the scared self holds on while the reasoned one lets go.
Mary Karr
#80. I want to believe your love is only for me. That your lips are mine. That your kisses are meant for me. That your body belongs to me." His arms move to my waist and tighten around me and he presses his hard body against mine. "But when you leave me to see him, it's hard to know for sure.
Kim Karr
#81. Do you know my band's song Once in a Lifetime?"
I nod my head because I know that song very well. It's one of the ones I used to listen repeatedly on my iPod.
"I wrote that song about you. About meeting you that night.
Kim Karr
#82. 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
#83. Whether you're a memoirist or not, there's a psychic cost for lopping yourself off from the past:
Mary Karr
#84. In those days, I still enjoyed a child's desperate tendency to put sparkles on my whole tribe.
Mary Karr
#85. 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
#86. We're not made to wallow in pleasure. Pleasure is joy's assassin.
Mary Karr
#87. 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
#88. For me, everything's too much and nothing's enough.
Mary Karr
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. I don't think I look like the pope's favorite Catholic - at least not under close scrutiny.
Mary Karr
#94. 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
#95. It's completely through prayer that I came to believe in God. I just sensed a presence south of my neck.
Mary Karr
#96. It's hard to be an articulate ghost.
Mary Karr
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. Just because two people ceased to exist as a unit, it didn't mean you no longer felt the other person's presence in your life.
Kim Karr
#100. Most morally ominous: from the second you choose one event over another, you're shaping the past's meaning.
Mary Karr