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Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.

Mary Karr

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Mary Karr
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: January 16
Historian
Poet
Writer
Groves
Texas
Bastards
Least
Part
Best
Even
Time

More quotes by 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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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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For me, everything's too much and nothing's enough.
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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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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Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.
Mary Karr
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I'm doomed to act like myself, even when it's inconvenient!
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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A pool game mixes ritual with geometry.
Mary Karr
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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.
Mary Karr
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Im always terrified when Im writing.
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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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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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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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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There are women succeeding beyond their wildest dreams because of their sobriety.
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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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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Love is the only passion which includes in its dreams the happiness of someone else.
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