Mary Karr Quotes

57 quotes in 1048 categories

• Memoir is not an act of history, but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.
• 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…
• 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…
• A pool game mixes ritual with geometry.
• I get so lonely sometimes, I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger.
• 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…
• Be willing to be a child and be the Lilliputian in the world of Gulliver.
• I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world.
• 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…
• 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,…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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.
• 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…
• Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.
• Im always terrified when Im writing.
• Love is the only passion which includes in its dreams the happiness of someone else.
• There are women succeeding beyond their wildest dreams because of their sobriety.
• I don't think I look like the pope's favorite Catholic - at least not under close scrutiny.

Browse Mary Karr Quotes by Category