Still, a living, breathing human being – even a boneheaded or barely articulate one – conveys so much in person. The physical fact of a creature with heart thrumming and neurons flickering – what Shakespeare called the ‘poor, bare, forked animal’ – compels us all; we’re all hardwired in moments of empathy to see ourselves in another.

— Mary Karr

Mary Karr Quotes

No writer can impose his own standards onto any other, nor claim to speak for the whole genre.

— Mary Karr

His silence hadn’t been helplessness – it hadn’t even been love. It had been pity.

— Mary Karr

You can be a slave to current magazines or a slave to history.

— Mary Karr

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.

— Mary Karr

To my mind, a small bit of catshit equals a catshit sandwich, unless I know where the catshit is and can eat around it.

— Mary Karr

They feed us the way the bread of communion does, with a nourishment that seems to form new flesh. According.

— Mary Karr

It’s hard to be an articulate ghost.

— Mary Karr

Why is it that everybody else is traffic?

— Mary Karr

Metaphorically speaking, I always make room for any evidence of scurvy in my characters, any mitigating ailments.

— Mary Karr

Together we read Keats’s letters to his lost beloved about how the stitches on a cap she made him went through him like a spear. I lace my fingers with his. The average non-poetry devotee may think the intensity around this stuff off-kilter at the least, but for us, it’s like digging our hands together into a secret vat of pearls. In that realm only we are rich as any royalty.

— Mary Karr

Maybe it fostered in me a creeping ambition-deficit disorder, but it could ease an ache. So anything worth doing could be undertaken later. Paint the apartment, write a book, quit booze, sure: tomorrow. Which.

— Mary Karr

Which ensures that life gets lived in miniature. In lieu of the large feelings – sorrow, fury, joy – I had their junior counterparts – anxiety, irritation, excitement. But.

— Mary Karr

Height – ours and our boyfriends – is a running contest between Lecia and me. If I tell her good news about myself, she’s liable to say ‘I’m five-nine’ and hang up.

— Mary Karr

Still, a living, breathing human being – even a boneheaded or barely articulate one – conveys so much in person. The physical fact of a creature with heart thrumming and neurons flickering – what Shakespeare called the ‘poor, bare, forked animal’ – compels us all; we’re all hardwired in moments of empathy to see ourselves in another.

— 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.

— Mary Karr

I’ve plumb forgot where I am for an instant, which is how a good lie should take you.

— Mary Karr

The goal of a voice is to speak not with objective authority but with subjective curiosity.

— Mary Karr

For the more haunted among us, only looking back at the past can permit it finally to become past.

— Mary Karr

The best memoirists stress the subjective nature of reportage. Doubt and wonder come to stand as part of the story.

— Mary Karr

In a great memoir, some aspect of the writer’s struggle for self often serves as the book’s organizing principle, and the narrator’s battle to become whole rages over the book’s trajectory.

— Mary Karr
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