Mary Karr Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. The editor self thinks only of saving the reader time and shaping a powerful emotional experience.

Mary Karr

#4. I'm doomed to act like myself, even when it's inconvenient!

Mary Karr

#5. 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

#6. Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.

Mary Karr

#7. 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

#8. You are loved, someone said. Take that and eat it.

Mary Karr

#9. 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

#10. Metaphorically speaking, I always make room for any evidence of scurvy in my characters, any mitigating ailments.

Mary Karr

#11. Daddy said a Republican was somebody who couldn't enjoy eating unless he knew somebody else was hungry,

Mary Karr

#12. 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

#13. One can't mount a stripper pole wearing a metal diving suit.

Mary Karr

#14. Standing in the shower, I feel something on the back of my leg that turns out to be my ass.

Mary Karr

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. Was behind in every conceivable way. So the old attack dog started howling through my head as I'd

Mary Karr

#19. As a memoirist, I strive for veracity.

Mary Karr

#20. Writing the real self seldom seems original enough when you first happen on it.

Mary Karr

#21. If you let yourself tell those smaller anecdotes or stories, the overarching capital-S Story will eventually rise into view.

Mary Karr

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. What would you write if you weren't afraid?

Mary Karr

#25. 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

#26. Nobody sounds good writing about your divorce, let's face it.

Mary Karr

#27. 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

#28. I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I'd been publishing for 20 years.

Mary Karr

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. His silence hadn't been helplessness - it hadn't even been love. It had been pity.

Mary Karr

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

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

Mary Karr

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. He never gave up on me, I only stopped being matriculated.

Mary Karr

#44. A university is a city of ideas, and we're grateful you became citizens of our city.

Mary Karr

#45. I'm always astonished by the confidence my readers put in me.

Mary Karr

#46. Having devoted the first half of my life to the dark, I feel obliged to rever any pinpoint of light now.

Mary Karr

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. Memoir done right is an art, a made thing. It's not just raw reportage flung splat on the page.

Mary Karr

#51. 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

#52. Slurping these spirits is soul preparation, a warped communion, myself serving as god, priest, and congregation.

Mary Karr

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world.

Mary Karr

#58. I think we fall in love and become adults and become citizens in a way by writing stories about ourselves.

Mary Karr

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech
the only prayers said.

Mary Karr

#62. 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

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. 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

#66. No writer can impose his own standards onto any other, nor claim to speak for the whole genre.

Mary Karr

#67. 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

#68. Life is a field of corn. Literature is the shot glass it distills down into. Lorrie Moore

Mary Karr

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. I'm always terrified when I'm writing.

Mary Karr

#75. A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.

Mary Karr

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. 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

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

Mary Karr

#83. 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

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

Mary Karr

#85. 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

#86. There are all kinds of things God wants me to do that I'm very obstreperous about.

Mary Karr

#87. 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

#88. Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild ...

Mary Karr

#89. 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

#90. 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

#91. 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

#92. 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

#93. 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

#94. I get so lonely sometimes, I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger.

Mary Karr

#95. The audiobooks I buy are never first-time reads - only rereadings of books I know well that I find intoxicating.

Mary Karr

#96. 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

#97. 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

#98. He was so proud that she had more going on north of her neck than her hairdo.

Mary Karr

#99. There are women succeeding beyond their wildest dreams because of their sobriety.

Mary Karr

#100. 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