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.
Any time you try to collapse the distance between your delusions about the past and what really happened, there is suffering involved.p. xx
VI. Wisdom: The Voice of GodNinety percent of what’s wrong with youcould be cured with a hot bath,says God through the manhole covers,but you want magic, to winthe lottery you never bought a ticket fo...
The memoirist’s job is not to add explosive whammies on every page, but to help the average person come in.
The changes are coming fast and blind now, and in your skull sits an hourglass with a grain size hole through which numb seconds are sliding.
The cans of bathroom cleaner they sold had faced the sun in their display pyramid for so long that their front labels had faded from lime green to pale lemon. The mouse-print instructions about not ea...
Most kids bent their heads onto their notebooks and tried to sleep. One boy gauged the quality of his day by sleeping on graph paper, then drawing a circle around the drool spot he’d made and comparin...
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 suppor...
I jerked huffing in air to holler, but the scream got stuck, just added itself onto the large round scream that all my life had been assembling in my chest.
I believe that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound:...
How much smaller the large places are once we're grown up, when we have car keys and credit cards.
But the boys' bicycle pack also sent a stab of envy through me. If I couldn't yet capture John Cleary with my feminine wiles, then surely I deserved to enjoy the physical abandon he got, liberties I i...
Born on third base, my daddy always said of the well off, and they think they hit a home run.
A hawk reeled overhead with a rodent squirming in its beak, close enough so you could see the bird’s black shiny eyes.
Whether you’re a memoirist or not, there’s a psychic cost for lopping yourself off from the past:
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.
The first night he slept with her, he took a washrag and a jug of wood alcohol to get rid of her makeup, saying he wanted to know what he was getting into.
I get so lonely sometimes, I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger.
He never gave up on me, I only stopped being matriculated.
But whether you’re a memoirist or not, there’s a psychic cost for lopping yourself off from the past: it may continue to tug on you without your being aware of it. And lying about it can—for all but t...