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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
Veracity
Strive
Memoirist

More quotes by 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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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 was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I'd been publishing for 20 years.
Mary Karr
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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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 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.
Mary Karr
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Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild.
Mary Karr
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Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.
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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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
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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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I'm not nearly smart enough or imaginative enough to tackle the novel form. Never happen.
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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Im always terrified when Im writing.
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