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As a memoirist, I strive for veracity.

Mary Karr

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Mary Karr
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: January 16
Historian
Poet
Writer
Groves
Texas
Memoirist
Veracity
Strive

More quotes by Mary Karr

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For me, everything's too much and nothing's enough.
Mary Karr
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A pool game mixes ritual with geometry.
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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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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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
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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'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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Love is the only passion which includes in its dreams the happiness of someone else.
Mary Karr
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Im always terrified when Im writing.
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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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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Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild.
Mary Karr
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I'm doomed to act like myself, even when it's inconvenient!
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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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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Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.
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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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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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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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