Quotes by Mary Karr

“I think about the story of Job I heard in Carol Sharp's Sunday school. How he sort of learned to lean into feeling hurt at the end, the way you might lean into a heavy wind that almost winds up sup...”

“When you've been hurt enough as a kid (maybe at any age), it's like you have a trick knee. Most of your life, you can function like an adult, but add in the right portions of sleeplessness and stre...”

“We're not made to wallow in pleasure. Pleasure is joy's assassin.”

“The head can travel a far piece while the body sits in one spot. It can traverse many decades, and many conversations can be had, even with the dead.”

“Joy, it is, which Ive never known before, only pleasure or excitement. Joy is a different thing, because its focus exists outside the self delight in something external, not satisfaction of some i...”

“Tomorrow! How sweet its prospects for a drunkard the night before. There is no better word. Before the earth hurls itself into sunshine, nothing is not possible.”

“But it's a neurological fact that the scared self holds on while the reasoned one lets go.”

“It's hard to be an articulate ghost.”

“Slurping these spirits is soul preparation, a warped communion, myself serving as god, priest, and congregation.”

“Standing in the shower, I feel something on the back of my leg that turns out to be my ass.”

“I loved the idea that looking at a painting or listening to a concerto could make you somehow "transcend" the day-in, day-out bullshit that grinds you down: how in one instant of pure attention you...”

“That bar also delineated the realm of sweat and hourly wage, the working world that college was educating me to leave. Rewards in that realm were few. No one congratulated you for clocking out. You...”

“The American religion-so far as there is one anymore-seems to be doubt. Whoever believes the least wins, because he'll never be found wrong.”

“I have a completely addictive personality. Diet Coke is my last - God, I know people counting days off Diet Coke; I'm such a Diet Cokehead. Now I won't let myself buy it.”

“If dysfunction means that a family doesn't work, then every family ambles into some arena in which that happens, where relationships get strained or even break down entirely. We fail each other or ...”

“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.”

“Poetry privileges music and is aesthetically more challenging. Prose privileges information and is emotionally more challenging.”

“Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time.”

“Just being out of the house with Daddy like this at Fisher's lights me up enough for somebody to read by me.”

“Being smart and rich are lucky, but being curious and compassionate will save your ass. Being curious and compassionate can take you out of your ego and edge your soul towards wonder.”