Quote

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.

Mary Karr

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Mary Karr
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: January 16
Historian
Poet
Writer
Groves
Texas
Lives
Divinity
Think
Doesn
Manage
Thinking
Light
Daily
Stills
Circumstances
Still
Fight
Bleak
Humanity
Hideous
Matter
Fighting
Lean
Even
Hope
Gorgeous
Love

More quotes by 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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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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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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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
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As a memoirist, I strive for veracity.
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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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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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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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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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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I find a great deal of comfort and care in my faith and prayer. I'd sooner do without air than prayer.
Mary Karr
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I do have a really good memory. I mean, like, I can remember all the phone numbers of everybody on the street I grew up on.
Mary Karr
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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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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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For me, everything's too much and nothing's enough.
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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Im always terrified when Im writing.
Mary Karr
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There are women succeeding beyond their wildest dreams because of their sobriety.
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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Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.
Mary Karr