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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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Mary Karr
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: January 16
Historian
Poet
Writer
Groves
Texas
Book
Marketplace
Thing
Paying
Stopped
Healthy
Books
Looking
Attention
Age
Bookstores

More quotes by 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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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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Love is the only passion which includes in its dreams the happiness of someone else.
Mary Karr
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I'm not nearly smart enough or imaginative enough to tackle the novel form. Never happen.
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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As a memoirist, I strive for veracity.
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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Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild.
Mary Karr
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I've never contended that I had a really horrible life.
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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A pool game mixes ritual with geometry.
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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I'm doomed to act like myself, even when it's inconvenient!
Mary Karr
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Nobody sounds good writing about your divorce, let's face it.
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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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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Be willing to be a child and be the Lilliputian in the world of Gulliver.
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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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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We are in the grip of some big machine grinding us along. The force of it simplifies everything. A weird calm settled over me from inside out. What is about to happen has stood in line to happen. All the roads out of that instant have been closed, one by one.
Mary Karr