Mary Karr Quotes
-
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.
→ -
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 think we fall in love and become adults and become citizens in a way by writing stories about ourselves.
→ -
I get so lonely sometimes, I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger.
→ -
There are women succeeding beyond their wildest dreams because of their sobriety.
→ -
As a memoirist, I strive for veracity.
→ -
Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.
→ -
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.
→ -
The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold.
→ -
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.
→ -
He never gave up on me, I only stopped being matriculated.
→ -
Age about 30, I stopped looking up my books in bookstores. Paying attention to the marketplace isn't a healthy thing for me.
→ -
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.
→ -
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
→ -
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.
→ -
I find a great deal of comfort and care in my faith and prayer. I'd sooner do without air than prayer.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild.
→ -
For me, everything's too much and nothing's enough.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.
→ -
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.
→ -
Having a great dad probably permitted me to pal around with guys in a way that some women don't.
→ -
People who didn't live pre-Internet can't grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. I stopped in the middle of the SAT to memorize a poem, because I thought, This is a great work of art and I'll never see it again.
→ -
I don't have a copy of my books, and the degree to which I never read them is profound. I never look.
→
Related Authors
-
Zadie Smith Novelist -
Don DeLillo Writer -
Rodney Crowell Musician -
Dana Spiotta Author -
Frank McCourt Teacher -
Jonathan Franzen Novelist -
Dave Eggers Writer -
Alexandra Fuller Author -
Koren Zailckas Writer -
Ann Patchett Author -
George Saunders Writer -
Mary-Louise Parker Actress -
David Foster Wallace Novelist -
Augusten Burroughs Writer -
Gary Shteyngart Writer -
Tobias Wolff Author -
Jeffrey Eugenides Novelist -
Jeannette Walls Writer -
Anne Lamott Novelist -
Terry Gross Radio host