Quote

I'd spent way more years worrying about how to look like a poet -- buying black clothes, smearing on scarlet lipstick, languidly draping myself over thrift-store furniture -- than I had learning how to assemble words in some discernible order.

Mary Karr

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Mary Karr
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: January 16
Historian
Poet
Writer
Groves
Texas
Order
Stores
Assemble
Look
Spent
Scarlet
Looks
Poet
Thrift
Years
Clothes
Lipstick
Way
Learning
Worrying
Like
Worry
Furniture
Words
Store
Smearing
Black
Buying
Discernible

More quotes by 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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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
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Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild.
Mary Karr
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For me, everything's too much and nothing's enough.
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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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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I tell people not to write too soon about their lives. Writing about yourself too young is loaded with psychological complexities.
Mary Karr
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I believe in God, but even if you don't, you can believe in a self, the person who is innately who you are. Once you fully become that person, then everything you do will be blessed.
Mary Karr
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There are women succeeding beyond their wildest dreams because of their sobriety.
Mary Karr
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The voice of God does not pander, offers no five-year plan, no long-term solution, nary an edict. It is small & fond & local. Don't look for your initials in the geese honking overhead or to see thru the glass even darkly. It says the most obvious crap - put down that gun, you need a sandwich.
Mary Karr
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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
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A pool game mixes ritual with geometry.
Mary Karr
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Love is the only passion which includes in its dreams the happiness of someone else.
Mary Karr
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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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As a memoirist, I strive for veracity.
Mary Karr
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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 the SAT to memorize a poem, because I thought, This is a great work of art and I'll never see it again.
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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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
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Im always terrified when Im writing.
Mary Karr
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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