In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said. — Mary Karr Communication Copy Share Image
“. . . for a good story, told often enough puts you in rooms you've never occupied.” — Mary Karr Good story Copy Share Image
I do have a really good memory. I mean, like, I can remember all the phone numbers of everybody on the street… — Mary Karr Copy Share Image
Most of the people I write about I'm still in touch with, so I would be loath to make up stuff about… — Mary Karr Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
How much smaller the large places are once we're grown up, when we have car keys and credit cards. — Mary Karr Copy Share Image
“The changes are coming fast and blind now, and in your skull sits an hourglass with a grain size hole through which… — Mary Karr Change Copy Share Image
Love is the only passion which includes in its dreams the happiness of someone else. — Mary Karr Dream Copy Share Image
People who didn't live pre-Internet can't grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. I stopped in the middle of… — Mary Karr Art Copy Share Image
“The first night he slept with her, he took a washrag and a jug of wood alcohol to get rid of her… — Mary Karr Copy Share Image
Your heart, Mary Karr, he'd say. His pen touched my sternum, and it felt for all the world like the point of… — Mary Karr Copy Share Image
I've been teaching classes on memoirs since 1986, and I've been reading them all my life, and I think that I would… — Mary Karr Copy Share Image
“But most of the time, we keep memories packed away. I sometimes liken that moment of sudden unpacking to circus clowns pouring… — Mary Karr Memories Copy Share Image
Those are only rumors of suffering. Real suffering has a face and a smell. It lasts in the most intense form no… — Mary Karr Copy Share Image
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… — Mary Karr Copy Share Image
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 Advantage Copy Share Image
No road offers more mystery than that first one you mount from the town you were born to, the first time you… — Mary Karr Copy Share Image
I think being tortured as a virtue is a kind of antiquated sense of what it is to be an artist. It… — Mary Karr Copy Share Image
“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… — Mary Karr Confessional Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
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 Clock Copy Share Image
Gary Shteyngart has written a memoir for the ages. I spat laughter on the first page and closed the last with wet… — Mary Karr Copy Share Image
“And you snap out of it. Or are snapped out of it. Never again will you lay a hand against yourself, not… — Mary Karr Abundance Copy Share Image
The shreiking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water. — Mary Karr Character Copy Share Image
On a piece of prose, you have to work at least six hours a day. I don't know how you can do… — Mary Karr Day Copy Share Image
“Daddy said a Republican was somebody who couldn’t enjoy eating unless he knew somebody else was hungry,” — Mary Karr Copy Share Image
I'm not nearly smart enough or imaginative enough to tackle the novel form. Never happen. — Mary Karr Creativity Copy Share Image
I don't have a copy of my books, and the degree to which I never read them is profound. I never look. — Mary Karr Book Copy Share Image
I think the problem with visual media like TV is that they're reductive. — Mary Karr Copy Share Image
I tell people not to write too soon about their lives. Writing about yourself too young is loaded with psychological complexities. — Mary Karr Copy Share Image
“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 Disappointment Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“Any time you try to collapse the distance between your delusions about the past and what really happened, there is suffering involved."… — Mary Karr Copy Share Image
“The trick in that town was getting through a night at all without stalling in the sludge of your own thoughts.” — Mary Karr Night Copy Share Image
I get about five memoirs per week in my mailbox, and few of them inspire anything but a desire to pick up… — Mary Karr Desire Copy Share Image
“(Later, I'l learn that's the structure of an elegy: lament, consolation; bad news, followed by good news.)” — Mary Karr Copy Share Image
