Mary Karr

I do have a really good memory. I mean, like, I can remember all the phone numbers of everybody on the street…

— Mary Karr

Ninety percent of what's wrong with you could be cured with a hot bath, says God from the bowels of the subway.…

— Mary Karr

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

— Mary Karr

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

— Mary Karr

“And Meredith says that reminds her of a Camus novel, the one about the plague, and she tells the story of it,…

— Mary Karr

When people suffer, their relationships usually suffer as well. Period. And we all suffer because, as the Buddha says, that's the nature…

— Mary Karr

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

— Mary Karr

“Then it hits me. I’m actually kneeling before a toilet. The throne, as other drunks call it. How many drunken nights and…

— 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…

— Mary Karr

I believe in God, but even if you don't, you can believe in a self, the person who is innately who you…

— Mary Karr

Love is the only passion which includes in its dreams the happiness of someone else.

— 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…

— Mary Karr

“I liked to call myself a poet and had affected a habit of reading classical texts (in translation, of course – I…

— Mary Karr

It turned out to be impossible for me to 'run away' in the sense other American teenagers did. Any movement at all…

— 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

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

— Mary Karr

Gary Shteyngart has written a memoir for the ages. I spat laughter on the first page and closed the last with wet…

— Mary Karr

I think being tortured as a virtue is a kind of antiquated sense of what it is to be an artist. It…

— Mary Karr

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

— Mary Karr

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

— Mary Karr

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

— Mary Karr

No road offers more mystery than that first one you mount from the town you were born to, the first time you…

— 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…

— Mary Karr

Both my parents were agnostic. My mother was kind of a Buddhist. She had some spiritual tendencies, but they were kind of…

— Mary Karr

Those are only rumors of suffering. Real suffering has a face and a smell. It lasts in the most intense form no…

— Mary Karr