Quotes by Mary Karr

“Bad things are gonna' happen to you, because they happen to us all. And worrying won't stave the really bad things off. Don't make the mistake of comparing your twisted-up insides to other people's...”

“A university is a city of ideas, and we're grateful you became citizens of our city.”

“I think a dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.”

“Joy, it is, which I've 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...”

“There are women succeeding beyond their wildest dreams because of their sobriety.”

“A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.”

“Mother’s particular devils had remained mysterious to me for decades. So had her past. Few born liars ever intentionally embark in truth’s direction, even those who believe that such a journey migh...”

“What hurts so bad about youth isn't the actual butt whippings the world delivers. It's the stupid hopes playacting like certainties.”

“Ten years, she's dead, and I still find myself some mornings reaching for the phone to call her. She could no more be gone than gravity or the moon.”

“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 ho...”

“Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But it could blow everybody's head off.”

“I lock all my scaredness down in my stomach until the fear hardens into something I hardly notice. I myself harden into a person that I hardly notice.”

“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 th...”

“I liked to call myself a poet and had affected a habit of reading classical texts (in translation, of course – I was a lazy student). I would ride the Greyhound for thirty-six hours down from the M...”

“If you live in the dark a long time and the sun comes out, you do not cross into it whistling. There's an initial uprush of relief at first, then-for me, anyway- a profound dislocation. My old assu...”

“But it’s a neurological fact that the scared self holds on while the reasoned one lets go. The adrenaline that let our ancestors escape the sabertooth tiger sears into the meat of our brains the ex...”

“If you'd told me even a year before...that I'd wind up whispering my sins in the confessional or on my knees saying the rosary, I would've laughed myself cockeyed. More likely pastime?Pole dancer. ...”

“Few born liars ever intentionally embark in truth’s direction, even those who believe that such a journey might axiomatically set them free.”

“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...”

“. . . for a good story, told often enough puts you in rooms you've never occupied.”