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Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Mary Karr Quotes

I’m always astonished by the confidence my readers put in me.

– Mary Karr

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

– Mary Karr

I get about five memoirs per week in my mailbox, and few of them inspire anything but a desire to pick up the channel changer.

– Mary Karr

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

– Mary Karr

The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold.

– Mary Karr

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.

– Mary Karr

Nobody sounds good writing about your divorce, let’s face it.

– Mary Karr

For days on end, I avoid the Web, never logging in until about two or three, after I’ve written all morning. On a good week, I don’t go online till after Wednesday, so four or five days might lapse without my checking e-mail.

– Mary Karr

Both my parents were agnostic. My mother was kind of a Buddhist. She had some spiritual tendencies, but they were kind of flaky – New Agey, you know? Which is partly why I’m suspicious of that sort of thing. I’m skeptical of any spiritual practice that doesn’t involve other people and doesn’t involve some sort of consistent tradition.

– Mary Karr

It’s completely through prayer that I came to believe in God. I just sensed a presence south of my neck.

– Mary Karr

I’m doomed to act like myself, even when it’s inconvenient!

– Mary Karr

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.

– Mary Karr

The audiobooks I buy are never first-time reads – only rereadings of books I know well that I find intoxicating.

– Mary Karr

I think being tortured as a virtue is a kind of antiquated sense of what it is to be an artist. It comes out of that Symbolist idea, back to Rimbaud and all that disordering of the senses and all of that being some exalted state. When I’ve been that way, I’ve always been less exalted than I would have liked.

– Mary Karr

When I got sober, I thought giving up was saying goodbye to all the fun and all the sparkle, and it turned out to be just the opposite. That’s when the sparkle started for me.

– Mary Karr

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.

– Mary Karr

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.

– Mary Karr

Age about 30, I stopped looking up my books in bookstores. Paying attention to the marketplace isn’t a healthy thing for me.

– Mary Karr

Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.

– Mary Karr

I’ve been teaching classes on memoirs since 1986, and I’ve been reading them all my life, and I think that I would like to write a critical book that might have some of those how-to elements in it.

– Mary Karr

Childhood was terrifying for me. A kid has no control. You’re three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, and illiterate. Terror snaps you awake. You pay keen attention. People can just pick you up and move you and put you down.

– 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 disappoint each other. That goes for parents, siblings, kids, marriage partners – the whole enchilada.

– Mary Karr

I don’t have a copy of my books, and the degree to which I never read them is profound. I never look.

– Mary Karr

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.

– Mary Karr

People who didn’t live pre-Internet can’t grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. The only bookstores sold Bibles the size of coffee tables and dashboard Virgin Marys that glowed in the dark.

– Mary Karr

I find a great deal of comfort and care in my faith and prayer. I’d sooner do without air than prayer.

– Mary Karr