Mary Karr quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Mary Karr

Mary Karr Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Mary Karr on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's completely through prayer that I came to believe in God. I just sensed a presence south of my neck.

Nothing matters but the quality of the affection - in the end - that has carved the trace in the mind dove

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

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.

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.

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

Born on third base, my daddy always said of the well off, and they think they hit a home run.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Her parents roared around in the masks of monsters. Not

If your goal is to polish up a fake person you can sell to a public you perceive as dumb, the unexamined life will do perfectly well, thank you.

Sentimentality is only emotion you haven't proven to the reader - emotion without vivid evidence.

The memoirist's job is not to add explosive whammies on every page, but to help the average person come in.

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

Any time you try to collapse the distance between your delusions about the past and what really happened, there is suffering involved."
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I don't have a copy of my books, and the degree to which I never read them is profound. I never look.

Poetry privileges music and is aesthetically more challenging. Prose privileges information and is emotionally more challenging.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

I think the problem with visual media like TV is that they're reductive.

Comfort makes fools of us that way, and a kid gets faith back quick.

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

A pool game mixes ritual with geometry.

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

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.

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

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

What would you write if you weren't afraid?

Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.

We're not made to wallow in pleasure. Pleasure is joy's assassin.

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.

I'm always terrified when I'm writing.

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

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

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

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

(Later, I'l learn that's the structure of an elegy: lament, consolation; bad news, followed by good news.)

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

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

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.

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.

Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time.

Truth works a trip wire that permits the book to explode into being.

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

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

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.

Success has affected my self-definition in that I have more money. Writers pooh-pooh that idea, but it's a huge deal.

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

Most of the people I write about I'm still in touch with, so I would be loath to make up stuff about them.

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

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

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

The head can travel a far piece while the body sits in one spot. It can traverse many decades, and many conversations can be had, even with the dead.

But it's a neurological fact that the scared self holds on while the reasoned one lets go.

It's hard to be an articulate ghost.

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.

Every writer needs two selves - the generative self and the editor self.

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

I've said it's hard. Here's how hard: everybody I know who wades deep enough into memory's waters drowns a little.

Whether you're a memoirist or not, there's a psychic cost for lopping yourself off from the past:

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

To my mind, a small bit of catshit equals a catshit sandwich, unless I know where the catshit is and can eat around it.

A hawk reeled overhead with a rodent squirming in its beak, close enough so you could see the bird's black shiny eyes.

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

Most morally ominous: from the second you choose one event over another, you're shaping the past's meaning.

Our strange cynicism about truth as a possibility has permitted us to accept all manner of bullshit

Dumb hope is what it hurts most to write, occupying the foolish schemes we pursued for decades, the blind alleys, the cliffs we stepped off.

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

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

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

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

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

The trick in that town was getting through a night at all without stalling in the sludge of your own thoughts.

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

They feed us the way the bread of communion does, with a nourishment that seems to form new flesh. According

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.

(Who but a drunk, I wonder looking back, could sit on the porch alone and get in an argument?)

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.

In those days, I still enjoyed a child's desperate tendency to put sparkles on my whole tribe.

As a memoirist, I strive for veracity.