Mary Karr Quotes

Quotes about:

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

  Mary Karr

  Family, Dysfunctional Family, Thanksgiving Day

  Mary Karr (2015). “The Liars' Club: A Memoir (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.16, Penguin

  83 Copy quote

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

  Mary Karr

  Life, Kindness, Monsters

  Mary Karr (2015). “The Liars' Club: A Memoir (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.256, Penguin

  40 Copy quote

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

  Mary Karr

  Part Time

  31 Copy quote

• 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

  Fighting, Thinking, Light

  "Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir No". Interviewed with Amanda Fortini, www.theparisreview.org. Winter 2009.

  31 Copy quote

• 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

  Mary Karr

  Laughter, Book, Reading

  40 Copy quote

• 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

  Reading, Flip, Heroin

  26 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, Healing, Body

  Mary Karr (2001). “Cherry”, p.173, Penguin

  23 Copy quote

• 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.

  Mary Karr

  Dark, Long, Profound

  23 Copy quote

• 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

  Blow, Air, Hands

  27 Copy quote

• 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

  Inspirational, Sympathy, Book

  "Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly" with Judy Valente, www.pbs.org. March 4, 2011.

  29 Copy quote

• Faith is a choice like any other. If you're picking a career or a husband - or deciding whether to have a baby - there are feelings and reasons pro and con out the wazoo. But thinking it through is - at the final hour - horse dookey. You can only try out.

  Mary Karr

  Family, Faith, Baby

  29 Copy quote

• 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

  Zero, Heart, Space

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  Believe, Blessed, Self

  14 Copy quote

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

  Mary Karr

  Needs, Alternatives, World

  8 Copy quote

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

  Mary Karr

  Lonely, Mail, Sometimes

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Sibling, Mean, Kids

  27 Copy quote

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

  Mary Karr

  Doomed, Inconvenient

  15 Copy quote

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

  Mary Karr

  Memories, Literature, Memoir

  "The Liars' Club: A Memoir". Book by Mary Karr, 1995.

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Morning, Loss, Moon

  24 Copy quote

• Every now and then we enter the presence of the numinous and deduce for an instant how we're formed, in what detail the force that infuses every petal might specifically run through us, wishing only to lure us into our full potential.

  Mary Karr

  Running, Wish, Full Potential

  17 Copy quote

• 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

  Goodbye, Fun, Giving Up

  15 Copy quote

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

  Mary Karr

  Keys, Car, Credit

  13 Copy quote

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

  Mary Karr

  Prayer, Speech, Sacred

  20 Copy quote

• 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

  Effort, Trying, World

  13 Copy quote

• 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

  Girl, Children, Yankee Stadium

  14 Copy quote

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