AtomicQuote

Mary Karr Quotes

But what if I don't believe in God? It's like they've sat me in front of a mannequin and said, Fall in love with him. You can't will feeling. What Jack says issues from some still, true place that cou...

Mary Karr

But what if I don't believe in God? It's like they've sat me in front of a mannequin and said, Fall in love with him. You can't will feeling. What Jack says issues from some still, true place that cou...

Tags: agnostic, alcoholics anonymous, atheist, desperation, prayer, prayers

If we didn't read people who were bastards, we'd never read anything. Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.

Mary Karr

If we didn't read people who were bastards, we'd never read anything. Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.

Tags: authors, authors behaving badly, authors on authors, feet of clay, heroes, imperfection, literature

About Author
Mary Karr (born January 16, 1955) is an American poet, essayist and memoirist from East Texas. She is widely noted for her 1995 bestselling memoir The Liars' Club. Karr is the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University.

The image pleases me enough : to slip from the body's tight container and into some luminous womb, gliding there without effort till the distant shapes glow brighter and more familiar, till all your b...

Mary Karr

The image pleases me enough : to slip from the body's tight container and into some luminous womb, gliding there without effort till the distant shapes glow brighter and more familiar, till all your b...

Tags: karr, mary, the liar s club

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

Mary Karr

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

Tags: memoir, memoirs

And you snap out of it. Or are snapped out of it. Never again will you lay a hand against yourself, not as long as there are plums to eat and somebody--anybody--who gives enough of a damn to haul them...

Mary Karr

And you snap out of it. Or are snapped out of it. Never again will you lay a hand against yourself, not as long as there are plums to eat and somebody--anybody--who gives enough of a damn to haul them...

The Lesson You've Gotto learn is the someday you'll someday stagger to, blinking in cold light, all tearsshed, ready to poke your bovine head in the yoke they've shaped.Everyone learns this. Born, eve...

Mary Karr

The Lesson You've Gotto learn is the someday you'll someday stagger to, blinking in cold light, all tearsshed, ready to poke your bovine head in the yoke they've shaped.Everyone learns this. Born, eve...

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

Mary Karr

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

Tags: humor

Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild...

Mary Karr

Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild...

Tags: karr, liars, mary

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 dis...

Mary Karr

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 dis...

Tags: work, family, parents

In some ways, writing a memoir is knocking yourself out with your own fist, if it’s done right.

Mary Karr

In some ways, writing a memoir is knocking yourself out with your own fist, if it’s done right.

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

Mary Karr

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

Unless you’re a doubter and a worrier, a nail-biter, an apologizer, a rethinker, then memoir may not be your playpen. That’s the quality I’ve found most consistently in those life-story writers I’ve m...

Mary Karr

Unless you’re a doubter and a worrier, a nail-biter, an apologizer, a rethinker, then memoir may not be your playpen. That’s the quality I’ve found most consistently in those life-story writers I’ve m...

And Meredith says that reminds her of a Camus novel, the one about the plague, and she tells the story of it, the tale holding you in thrall, and she ends her version with a line you’ll write down in...

Mary Karr

And Meredith says that reminds her of a Camus novel, the one about the plague, and she tells the story of it, the tale holding you in thrall, and she ends her version with a line you’ll write down in...

Whether you’re a memoirist or not, there’s a psychic cost for lopping yourself off from the past:

Mary Karr

Whether you’re a memoirist or not, there’s a psychic cost for lopping yourself off from the past:

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

Mary Karr

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

Tags: memoir, memoirs

I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory a slippery hold...

Mary Karr

I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory a slippery hold...

But because of you, I couldn’t die and couldn’t monster myself, either. So you were the agent of my rescue—not a good job for somebody barely three feet tall. Blameless

Mary Karr

But because of you, I couldn’t die and couldn’t monster myself, either. So you were the agent of my rescue—not a good job for somebody barely three feet tall. Blameless

It's hard to be an articulate ghost.

Mary Karr

It's hard to be an articulate ghost.

Tags: memoirs

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

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.

You think you know the story so well. It’s a mansion inside your head, each room just waiting to be described, but pretty much every memoirist I’ve ever talked to finds the walls of such rooms changin...

Mary Karr

You think you know the story so well. It’s a mansion inside your head, each room just waiting to be described, but pretty much every memoirist I’ve ever talked to finds the walls of such rooms changin...