Top Mary Karr Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Mary Karr Biography

Mary Karr (born January 16, 1955) is an American poet, essayist and memoirist from East Texas. She rose to fame in 1995 with the publication of her bestselling memoir The Liars' Club. She is the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University

Read about Mary Karr in Wikipedia

Random Authors

Mary Karr Quotes

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.

Daily, Fighting, Light, Lives, Matter, Thinking

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.

Art, Ideas, People, Poem, Sat, Stopped

A pool game mixes ritual with geometry.

Games, Geometry, Pool, Ritual

The emotional stakes a memoirist bets with could not be higher, and it's physically enervating. I nap on a daily basis like a cross-country trucker.

Country, Emotional, Memoirist, Naps, Physically, Stakes

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.

Baby, Con, Faith, Family, Picking, Thinking

When you do try to picture the boys who do ask you out, they're absolutely featureless, like old carvings eroded by centuries of rain and wind.

Ask, Boys, Carvings, Eroded, Rain, Wind

Every now and then we enter the presence of the numinous and deduce for an instant how we're formed, in what detail the force that infuses every petal might specifically run through us, wishing only to lure us into our full potential.

Force, Full Potential, Infuses, Running, Wish, Wishing

The truth is when I went to graduate school I would've said I was among the least talented of the students, I was certainly the least smart, or less educated. But I worked very hard.

Educated, Hard, Said, School, Smart, Students

Having a great dad probably permitted me to pal around with guys in a way that some women don't.

Dad, Guy, Having, Pals, Way, Women

I've never contended that I had a really horrible life.

Contended, Horrible, Horrible Life, Life

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.

Gravity, Loss, Moon, Morning, Phone, Years

I tell people not to write too soon about their lives. Writing about yourself too young is loaded with psychological complexities.

People, Psychological, Write, Writing

For me, everything's too much and nothing's enough.

Enough, Too Much

I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I'd been publishing for 20 years.

Old, Overnight, Overnight Success, Publishing, Success, Years

I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world.

Alternatives, Needs, World, Writer

Gary Shteyngart has written a memoir for the ages. I spat laughter on the first page and closed the last with wet eyes. Un-put-down-able in the day and a half I spent reading it, Little Failure is a window into immigrant agony and ambition, Jewish angst, and anybody's desperate need for a tribe. Readers who've fallen for Shteyngart's antics on the page will relish the trademark humor. But here it's laden and leavened with a deep, consequential, psychological journey. Brave and unflinching, Little Failure is his best book to date

Angst, Book, Jewish, Laughter, Memoir, Reading

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.

Good, Mean, Memories, Memory, Phone, Phones

Your heart, Mary Karr, he'd say. His pen touched my sternum, and it felt for all the world like the point of a dull spear as he said, Your heart knows what your head don't. Or won't.

Dull, Heart, Knows, Like, Sternum, World

When people suffer, their relationships usually suffer as well. Period. And we all suffer because, as the Buddha says, that's the nature of being human and wanting stuff we don't always get.

Buddha, People, Stuff, Suffering, Usually

In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said.

Household, Prayer, Sacred, Speech

1