Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Mary Karr
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: January 16
Historian
Poet
Writer
Groves
Texas
Live
Poem
Great
Stopped
Work
Internet
Never
Middle
Life
Art
Memorize
People
Didn
Devoid
Thought
Grasp
Ideas
Sat

More quotes by Mary Karr

Image
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.
Mary Karr
Image
Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.
Mary Karr
Image
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
Image
Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.
Mary Karr
Image
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
Image
There are women succeeding beyond their wildest dreams because of their sobriety.
Mary Karr
Image
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
Image
Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild.
Mary Karr
Image
As a memoirist, I strive for veracity.
Mary Karr
Image
I've never contended that I had a really horrible life.
Mary Karr
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I'd been publishing for 20 years.
Mary Karr
Image
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
Image
I tell people not to write too soon about their lives. Writing about yourself too young is loaded with psychological complexities.
Mary Karr
Image
A pool game mixes ritual with geometry.
Mary Karr
Image
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
Image
I'm not nearly smart enough or imaginative enough to tackle the novel form. Never happen.
Mary Karr
Image
The shreiking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.
Mary Karr