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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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Be willing to be a child and be the Lilliputian in the world of Gulliver.
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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 tell people not to write too soon about their lives. Writing about yourself too young is loaded with psychological complexities.
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I'm doomed to act like myself, even when it's inconvenient!
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As a memoirist, I strive for veracity.
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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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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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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 was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I'd been publishing for 20 years.
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The shreiking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.
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A pool game mixes ritual with geometry.
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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 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've never contended that I had a really horrible life.
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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Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild.
Mary Karr
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For me, everything's too much and nothing's enough.
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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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.
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