Mary Karr Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

A pool game mixes ritual with geometry.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Ninety percent of what's wrong with you could be cured with a hot bath, says God from the bowels of the subway. but we want magic, to win the lottery we never bought a ticket for.

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

I don't have a copy of my books, and the degree to which I never read them is profound. I never look.

Age about 30, I stopped looking up my books in bookstores. Paying attention to the marketplace isn't a healthy thing for me.

As a memoirist, I strive for veracity.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Im always terrified when Im writing.

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

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.

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.

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.

What hurts so bad about youth isn't the actual butt whippings the world delivers. It's the stupid hopes playacting like certainties.

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.

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.