Mary Karr Quotes & Sayings

Students love trying to imitate Nabokov, which teaches them a lot - mostly about why not to imitate somebody wired so differently from yourself. Nabokov wannabes don't sound just like turds, but like pretentious turds. The writer's best voice will grow from embracing her own "you-ness" - which I call talent, and which is best expressed in voice. Which — Mary Karr

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

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

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

It's hard to be an articulate ghost. — Mary Karr

It strikes me that whatever advantages there are to being a boy
getting to stay out late and having other people wash your clothes and bring you plates of stuff
get undercut by having to play football. — Mary Karr

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

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

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

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

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

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

Asking me how to write a memoir is a little like saying, "I really want to have sex, where do I start?" What one person fantasizes about would ruin the romance for another. — Mary Karr

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

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

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

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

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

It takes an obsessive streak that borders on lunacy to go rummaging around in the past as memoirists are wont to do, particularly a fragmented or incendiary past, in which facts are sparse and stories don't match up. I don't know if memoirists as children are lied to more often as kids or only grow up to resent it more, but it does seem we often come from the ranks of orphans or half-orphans-through-divorce, trying to heal schisms inside ourselves. Like everybody, I suppose, people we loved broke our hearts because only they had access to them, and we broke our own hearts later by following their footsteps and reenacting their mistakes. — Mary Karr

The creature you find in Speak, Memory is rare enough to be zoo-worthy. He's not just smarter but somehow more effete than most of us without seeming put on. Resenting him for it would be like resenting a gazelle for her grace. He doesn't sound prissy painting himself as a cultivated synesthete who can hear colors and see music, nor vain talking as a polyglot who translates his own work back and forth into many languages. He's just your standard virtuoso aristocrat from a gilded age. Which is the miracle of his talent. He has shaped the book to highlight his own magnificent way of viewing the world, a viewpoint that so eats your head that you never really leave his very oddly bejeweled skull, and you value things in the book's context as he does, never missing what you otherwise adore in another kind of writer. — Mary Karr

I fixed her a drink, then lowered myself on the spider's silk of my attention back into One Hundred Years of Solitude and the adventures of the Buendia family. The scene where the prodigal Jose Arcadio hoisted his adopted sister by her waist into his hammock and, in my translation, 'quartered her like a little bird' made my face hot. I bent down the page, whose small triangle marks the instant.
Touching that triangle of yellowed paper today is like sliding my hand into the glove of my seventeen-year-old hand. Through magic, there are the Iowa fields slipping by ... And there is my mother, not yet born into the ziplock baggie of ash my sister sent me years ago with the frank message 'Mom 1/2', written in laundry pen, since no-one in our family ever stood on ceremony. — Mary Karr

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lesson You've Got
to learn is the someday you'll someday
stagger to, blinking in cold light, all tears
shed, ready to poke your bovine head
in the yoke they've shaped.
Everyone learns this. Born, everyone
breathes, pays tax, plants dead
and hurts galore. There's grief enough
for each. My mother
learned by moving man to man,
outlived them all. The parched earth's
bare (once she leaves it) of any who watched
the instants I trod it.
Other than myself, of course.
I've made a study of bearing
and forbearance. Everyone does,
it turns out, and note
those faces passing by: Not one's a god. — Mary Karr

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

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

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

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

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. — Mary Karr

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

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

If you'd told me even a year before ... that I'd wind up whispering my sins in the confessional or on my knees saying the rosary, I would've laughed myself cockeyed. More likely pastime?Pole dancer. International spy. Drug mule. Assassin.
I drive under a sky black as graphite to meet my new spiritual director ... a bulky Franciscan nun named Sister Margaret, patiently going blind behind fish-tank glasses that magnify her eyes like goggles. — Mary Karr

Both my parents were agnostic. My mother was kind of a Buddhist. She had some spiritual tendencies, but they were kind of flaky - New Agey, you know? Which is partly why I'm suspicious of that sort of thing. I'm skeptical of any spiritual practice that doesn't involve other people and doesn't involve some sort of consistent tradition. — Mary Karr

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. — Mary Karr

I have a completely addictive personality. Diet Coke is my last - God, I know people counting days off Diet Coke; I'm such a Diet Cokehead. Now I won't let myself buy it. — Mary Karr

Bad things are gonna' happen to you, because they happen to us all. And worrying won't stave the really bad things off. Don't make the mistake of comparing your twisted-up insides to other people's blow-dried outsides. Even the most privileged person in this stadium suffers the torments of the damned just going about the business of being human. — Mary Karr

Your mother rolls her eyes at the cat lapping grapefruit juice, says, Everything that comes into this house is crazy - whether we choose them for that or they get that way, I don't know. — Mary Karr

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

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

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

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

Her parents roared around in the masks of monsters. Not — Mary Karr

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

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. — Mary Karr

I think being tortured as a virtue is a kind of antiquated sense of what it is to be an artist. It comes out of that Symbolist idea, back to Rimbaud and all that disordering of the senses and all of that being some exalted state. When I've been that way, I've always been less exalted than I would have liked. — Mary Karr

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

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

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

And you snap out of it. Or are snapped out of it. Never again will you lay a hand against yourself, not as long as there are plums to eat and somebody
anybody
who gives enough of a damn to haul them to you. So long as you bear the least nibblet of love for any other creature in this dark world, though in love portions are never stingy. There are no smidgens on pinches, only rolling abundance. That's how you acquire the resolution for survival that the upcoming years are about to demand. You don't give it. You earn it. — Mary Karr

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

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

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

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

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

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

At the Sound of the Gunshot,
Leave A Message

That's what my friend spoke
into his grim machine the winter he first went mad
as we both did in our thirties with still
no hope of revenue, gravely inking
our poems on pages held fast by gyres
the color of lead.

Godless, our minds
did monster us, left us bobbing as in a swamp
until we sank. His eyes were burn holes
in a swollen face. His breath was a venom
he drank deep of. He called his own tongue
a scar, this poet

who can crowbar open
the most sealed heart, make ash flower,
and the cocked shotgun's double-zero mouths
(whose pellets had exploded star holes into plaster and porcelain
and not a few locked doors) never touched
my friend's throat. Praise

Him, whose earth is green.

(for Franz Wright) — Mary Karr

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

And Meredith says that reminds her of a Camus novel, the one about the plague, and she tells the story of it, the tale holding you in thrall, and she ends her version with a line you'll write down in your notebook, the place where the atheist doctor hollers at a priest: All your certainties aren't worth one strand of a woman's hair. — Mary Karr

Joy, it is, which I've never known before, only pleasure or excitement. Joy is a different thing, because its focus exists outside the self-delight in something external, not satisfaction of some inner craving. — Mary Karr

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

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

During my short college stint, every time I picked up a pen, this grinding, unnamed fear overcame me - later identified as fear that my real self would spill out. One can't mount a stripper pole wearing a metal diving suit. What I needed to write kept simmering up while I wrote down everything but that. In fact, I kept ginning out reasons that writing reality was impossible. I cranked up therapy and drank like a fish. — Mary Karr

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

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

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

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

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

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

When you've been hurt enough as a kid (maybe at any age), it's like you have a trick knee. Most of your life, you can function like an adult, but add in the right portions of sleeplessness and stress and grief, and the hurt, defeated self can bloom into place. — Mary Karr

I kept the fingers of my left hand crossed all the time, while on my right-hand fingers I counted anything at all - steps to the refrigerator, seconds on the clock, words in a sentence - to keep my head occupied. The counting felt like something to hang on to, as if finding the right numbers might somehow crack the code on whatever system ran the slippery universe we were moving through. — Mary Karr

When the truth would be unbearable the mind often just blanks it out. But some ghost of an event may stay in your head. Then, like the smudge of a bad word quickly wiped off a school blackboard, this ghost can call undue attention to itself by its very vagueness. You keep studying the dim shape of it, as if the original form will magically emerge. This blank spot in my past, then, spoke most loudly to me by being blank. It was a hole in my life that I both feared and kept coming back to because I couldn't quite fill it in. — Mary Karr

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Mary Karr

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Writing, regardless of the end result - whether good or bad, published or not, well reviewed or slammed - means celebrating beauty in an often ugly world. — Mary Karr

I spent nine hard, exasperating, concentrated months on the first chapter of Liars' Club alone, which was essentially time developing that voice - a watchmaker's minuscule efforts, noodling with syntax and diction. Were I to add on the time I spent trying to recount that book's events in poetry and a novel, I could argue that concocting that mode of speech actually occupied some thirteen years (seventeen, if you count the requisite years in therapy getting the nerve up). What was I doing during those nine months? Mostly I just shoved words around the page. I'd get up at four or five when my son was asleep, then work. I'd try telling something one way, then another. If a paragraph seemed half decent, I'd cut it out and tape it to the wall. — Mary Karr

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

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

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

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

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. — Mary Karr

Charm is from the Latin carmen: to sing. By "charm," I mean sing well enough to hold the reader in thrall. Whatever people like about you in the world will manifest itself on the page. What drives them crazy will keep you humble. You'll need both sides of yourself - the beautiful and the beastly - to hold a reader's attention. — Mary Karr