Quote

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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Mary Karr
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: January 16
Historian
Poet
Writer
Groves
Texas
Kids
Childhood
Flat
People
Pay
Flats
Move
Tall
Feet
Awake
Snaps
Control
Broke
Illiterate
Attention
Pick
Keen
Moving
Terror
Unemployed
Three
Picks
Terrifying

More quotes by 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.
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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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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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I've never contended that I had a really horrible life.
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For me, everything's too much and nothing's enough.
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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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Nobody sounds good writing about your divorce, let's face it.
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Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.
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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 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.
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As a memoirist, I strive for veracity.
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A pool game mixes ritual with geometry.
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There are women succeeding beyond their wildest dreams because of their sobriety.
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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.
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I'm doomed to act like myself, even when it's inconvenient!
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Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild.
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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.
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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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I'm not nearly smart enough or imaginative enough to tackle the novel form. Never happen.
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Be willing to be a child and be the Lilliputian in the world of Gulliver.
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