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

His hold is tight, our fingers are laced, and he's occasionally rubbing circles on the top of my hand with his thumb. These small gestures definitely make handholding seem more like an art. — Kim Karr

Pressing his lips firmly to mine, he starts to kiss me in the most erotic way. First, he lightly kisses me, then opens our mouths together and exhales. I can only inhale his sweet breath. He runs the tip of his tongue over my lower lip before slipping it into my mouth and firmly pressing his lips to mine. I'm left breathless as the kiss ends and he takes my hand. — Kim Karr

Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it. — Mary Karr

A pool game mixes ritual with geometry. — Mary Karr

Let us try to see things from their better side: You complain about seeing thorny rose bushes; Me, I rejoice and give thanks to the gods That thorns have roses. — Alphonse Karr

Every reporter who came up in legacy media can tell you about a come-to-Jesus moment when an editor put them up against a wall and tattooed a message deep into their skull: show respect for the fundamentals of the craft, or you would not soon be part of it. — Mary Karr

I once heard Don DeLillo quip that a fiction writer starts with meaning and then manufactures events to represent it; a memoirist starts with events, then derives meaning from them. — 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 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

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

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

He kisses each of my eyelids and hovering his mouth over mine, he talks around my lips. "Ever since I met you, no one else has been worth thinking about."
I open my eyes, and he presses his forehead to mine as he continues, "I feel like fate has brought us together again. I also believe that one night, so long ago, just wasn't the right time for us. But tonight is. — Kim Karr

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

Staring down at my wrist, I can't believe what I'm looking at. This adorably sweet and sexy man has just placed a very colorful linked bracelet of the cutest Pac-Man on my wrist. It has a yellow Pac-Man with the blue, red, pink, and orange monsters on it.
"I love it!" I manage as I swallow back my tears of joy. I throw myself around him and say, "Thank you."
He lifts me up and twirls me just once before setting me down. "Happy?"
Smiling up at him, I respond, "More than happy. — Kim 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

All people have three characters, that which they exhibit, that which they are, and that which they think they are. — Alphonse Karr

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. — Mary Karr

The fact that my house was Not Right metastasized into the notion that I myself was somehow Not Right, or that my survival in the world depended on my constant vigilance against various forms of Not-Rightness. — 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

Women's glances express what they dare not speak. — Alphonse Karr

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

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. — Mary Karr

I couldn't shake the impulse to help him. It seemed that the older I got the more I believed that everyone, homeless or not, deserved to be treated at least like a human. — Julia Karr

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

Creativity is something to be uncovered, not something to be wished for. — Andy Karr

I always thought my family was so bizarre, so when people started coming up to me and saying, 'My family was exactly like yours,' I was completely knocked out. — Mary Karr

None of us can ever know the value of our lives, or how our separate and silent scribbling may add to the amenity of the world, if only by how radically it changes us, one and by one. — 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

As a memoirist, I strive for veracity. — Mary Karr

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

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

Uncertainty is the worst of all evils until the moment when reality makes us regret uncertainty. — Alphonse Karr

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

You think you know the story so well. It's a mansion inside your head, each room just waiting to be described, but pretty much every memoirist I've ever talked to finds the walls of such rooms changing shape around her. There are shattering earthquakes, tectonic-plate-type shifts. Or it's like memory is a snow globe that invariably gets shaken so as to shroud the events inside. — 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

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

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

Real You is all you have, and all other paths are false. And in the best case, Real You is so happy to finally be recognized, it rewards you with Originality. — Mary Karr

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

It's your body, we'll go slow if you want or as hard as you want. — Kim Karr

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

You're back and forth with me, with your actions, with your emotions. You act like you don't remember me, then spring on me that you do. You flirt with me and then you stop on a dime. You kiss me and then you pull away as soon as I touch you. You're mad then you're not." I don't stop to take a breath or let him speak before finally raising the hand he's holding and letting it go. "You're holding my hand, then . . ." I trail off, not sure of how to finish that thought. Tearing my gaze from his, I try to rein in my emotions, to wipe the flustered girl up off the floor. — Kim Karr

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

Though we have two eyes, we are supplied with but one tongue. Draw your own moral. — Alphonse Karr

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

Don't leave me," I yell as he walks down the path leading to another life.
Turning and glancing at me over his shoulder, his eyes are no longer gleaming their perfect shade of green; they're cloudy, hazy even. "I'm not," he says as he keeps walking. "You left me, beautiful girl. — Kim Karr

Dahlia, I love everything about you. I know in my heart you're my girl, so amazing, so fun, so beautiful." I feel my heart pounding and I know it's about to jump out of my chest. Turning my head, I look into his eyes. The same gleaming green eyes as the first time I saw him. I thought then what I know now, that if I jump in I will never swim out. They are telling me he's my future. — Kim Karr

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

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

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

I feel alive again - living, breathing, and experiencing life like I never had before - because of him. He took me to places within my body and my soul I've never been, and I wanted to discover more. — Kim Karr

Could we do the interview thing tomorrow because you're looking far too sexy for me to concentrate on anything other than you? — Kim Karr

Some people are always grumbling because roses have thorns; I am thankful that thorns have roses. — Alphonse Karr

Friendship between two women is always a plot against another one. — Alphonse 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

He feels so real. He's what I crave. He's what I want. He makes me feel alive. — Kim Karr

Botany is the art of insulting flowers in Greek and Latin. — Alphonse Karr

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

Love is the most terrible, and also the most generous of the passions; it is the only one which includes in its dreams the happiness of someone else. — Alphonse Karr

Many people think that virtue consists of severity towards others. — Alphonse Karr

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

The more the change, the more it is the same thing. — Alphonse Karr

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

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 gather from a lawyer that there was a rehearsal yesterday. We haven't a hope. I know the presiding judge too: I've had the misfortune to sleep with his wife. He was specially picked. — Alphonse Karr

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

There's nothing to see through. Feel this." His lips skim down my neck. "This is me." He presses his body to mine. "All of me." His voice is low and seductive. — Kim Karr

River doesn't let me finish my sentence as he gently pushes me back against the rail. His arms are extended on either side of me, he's surrounding me, caging me in, but once again, I don't feel trapped. He never moves his lips away from my neck as he repositions us. My breath is hitched and my heartbeat has doubled as I tilt my head back to allow him full access to my neck. He's softly running a trail of kisses from my neck up to my mouth, slowly, lightly licking, softly sucking, until his lips finally meet mine. — Kim Karr

Sometimes in the dark of the night we see what we want, wish for things that can never be, have hope we shouldn't. — Kim 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

I threw away over 1,200 finished pages of my last memoir and broke the delete key on my keyboard changing my mind. If I had any balls at all, I'd make a brooch out of it. — Mary Karr

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

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

It was a feminist act, revealing secrets in order to free herself and the women of her clan from the silence and obscurity to which a misogyny thousands of years old would have relegated them. — Mary Karr

Some people grumble that roses have thorns; I am grateful that thorns have roses. — Alphonse 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

Don't forget to capture all the moments that really matter. — Kim Karr

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. — 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

But the boys' bicycle pack also sent a stab of envy through me. If I couldn't yet capture John Cleary with my feminine wiles, then surely I deserved to enjoy the physical abandon he got, liberties I instinctively knew were vanishing. (I know, I know. Psychoanalytic theory would label this pecker envy and seek to smack me on the nose with it. To that I'd say, o please. Of actual johnsons I had little awareness. What I coveted was privilege.) — 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

You were my once in a lifetime.
This I knew from the moment your eyes met mine.
You were my once in a lifetime.
This I knew the first time I whispered into your ear and my heart stopped.
You were my once in a lifetime.
This I knew when your face touched my spirit.
You were my once in a lifetime.
This I knew when I kissed your lips and felt it in my soul.
So where did you go, where did you go? — Kim Karr

The first night he slept with her, he took a washrag and a jug of wood alcohol to get rid of her makeup, saying he wanted to know what he was getting into. — Mary Karr

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

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

To women who think they're all that, may their boobs drop at a young age. — Kim Karr

What would you write if you weren't afraid? — Mary Karr

A widow is like a frigate of which the first captain has been shipwrecked. — Alphonse Karr

I need you next to me when I wake up in the morning and lying beside me when I fall asleep at night. I need you like the air I breathe. — Kim 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

Almost every one flatters himself that he and his are exceptionable. — Alphonse Karr

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. — 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

After a lifetime of hounding authors for advice, I've heard three truths from every mouth: (1) Writing is painful
it's 'fun' only for novices, the very young, and hacks; (2) other than a few instances of luck, good work only comes through revision; (3) the best revisers often have reading habits that stretch back before the current age, which lends them a sense of history and raises their standards for quality. — Mary Karr