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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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Mary Karr
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: January 16
Historian
Poet
Writer
Groves
Texas
Gulliver
Willing
Child
Children
Writing
World

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.
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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.
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There are women succeeding beyond their wildest dreams because of their sobriety.
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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.
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Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.
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A pool game mixes ritual with geometry.
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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.
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I'm not nearly smart enough or imaginative enough to tackle the novel form. Never happen.
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I've never contended that I had a really horrible life.
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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.
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The shreiking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.
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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.
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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.
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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 be the Lilliputian in the world of Gulliver, the bat girl in Yankee Stadium. That’s a more fruitful way to be.
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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.
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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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Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild.
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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 divinity. We lean into love, even in the most hideous circumstances. We manage to hope.
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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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I tell people not to write too soon about their lives. Writing about yourself too young is loaded with psychological complexities.
Mary Karr