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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.

Mary Karr

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Mary Karr
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: January 16
Historian
Poet
Writer
Groves
Texas
Willing
Stadium
Way
Child
Fruitful
Good
Suffering
Stadiums
World
Idea
Yankees
Girl
Bats
Ideas
Confident
Suffer
Gulliver
Children
Writers
Yankee
Great

More quotes by Mary Karr

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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'm doomed to act like myself, even when it's inconvenient!
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Nobody sounds good writing about your divorce, let's face it.
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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.
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There are women succeeding beyond their wildest dreams because of their sobriety.
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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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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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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.
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Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.
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Love is the only passion which includes in its dreams the happiness of someone else.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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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A pool game mixes ritual with geometry.
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.
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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
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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