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Mother’s particular devils had remained mysterious to me for decades. So had her past. Few born liars ever intentionally embark in truth’s direction, even those who believe that such a journey might axiomatically set them free.

Mary Karr

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Mary Karr
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: January 16
Historian
Poet
Writer
Groves
Texas
Mother
Mysterious
Past
Decades
Truth
Direction
Ever
Devil
Embark
Might
Journey
Intentionally
Even
Particular
Devils
Believe
Free
Remained
Born
Liars

More quotes by Mary Karr

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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
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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
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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
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Be willing to be a child and be the Lilliputian in the world of Gulliver.
Mary Karr
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The shreiking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.
Mary Karr
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We are in the grip of some big machine grinding us along. The force of it simplifies everything. A weird calm settled over me from inside out. What is about to happen has stood in line to happen. All the roads out of that instant have been closed, one by one.
Mary Karr
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Nobody sounds good writing about your divorce, let's face it.
Mary Karr
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I'm doomed to act like myself, even when it's inconvenient!
Mary Karr
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Im always terrified when Im writing.
Mary Karr
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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
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I'm not nearly smart enough or imaginative enough to tackle the novel form. Never happen.
Mary Karr
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I've never contended that I had a really horrible life.
Mary Karr
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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
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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
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Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.
Mary Karr
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Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.
Mary Karr
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Ninety percent of what's wrong with you could be cured with a hot bath, says God from the bowels of the subway. but we want magic, to win the lottery we never bought a ticket for.
Mary Karr
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A pool game mixes ritual with geometry.
Mary Karr
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I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I'd been publishing for 20 years.
Mary Karr
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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