Quotes from Mary Karr

a loafer-wearing debutante suggested jokingly to her that if God had wanted women to wear heels, He wouldn't have designed our feet as He did. Lecia replied that if God hadn't intended us to wear heels, She wouldn't have made our legs look so great in them.)

her parents roared around in the masks of monsters. Not

It was an old game for us. Tell me a story, she liked to say, meaning charm me—my life in this Texas suckhole is duller than a rubber knife. Amaze me. If I ever wonder what made me a writer—if I tug the thread of that urgent need I have to put marks on paper, it invariably leads me back to Mother, sprawled in bed with a luminous hangover, and how some book of rhymes I've done in crayon and stapled together could puncture the soap bubble of her misery.

When two hearts beat as one, there are in-laws to bond with, or, in my family's case, outlaws. But for our first years Warren and I never go to Texas, not once. (Later, I'll resent this like hell, but I don't recall arguing about it much.) Daddy's dying in the house I grew up in, while Mother begrudgingly nurses him.

comfort makes fools of us that way, and a kid gets faith back quick.

What small whiz-kid luster I'd given off in grade school had gone to mist starting my sunglassed junior year. I knew some Shakespeare plays, and I'd read a couple great books till their spines split.

Propaganda seeks to destroy art in order to sanitize culture.

Instead, I'd signed up for classes related to linguistic philosophy, for which I had even less talent. In Walt's own seminar, we were reading neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer—a brick I broke my brain on.

Hyperbole often reflects a culture's excesses and savagery or appetite.

I loved the idea that looking at a painting or listening to a concerto could make you somehow transcend the day-in, day-out bullshit that grinds you down; how in one instant of pure attention you could draw something inside that made you forever larger.

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 supporting you after a while. People can get behind pain that way, if they think it derives from powers larger than themselves.

This is the breezy parlance of the anesthesia dude. He stands in the door with clip-on sunglasses flipped up from his specs. He's clearly on his way out. Whaddayou mean, I roar at him, whaddayou MEAN it didn't take! I'm incapable of speaking without exclamation points and italics and any available typographical inflation.

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.

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 comparing it for size and integrity to his drool spot from the day before. For

Then it hits me. I'm actually kneeling before a toilet. The throne, as other drunks call it. How many drunken nights and slungover mornings did I worship at this altar, emptying myself of poison. And yet to pray to something above me, something invisible, had—before now—seemed degrading.

No matter how self-aware you are, memoir wrenches at your insides precisely because it makes you battle with your very self – your neat analyses and tidy excuses… Your small pieties and impenetrable, mostly unconscious poses invariably trip you up. p. xxi

They seemed to trust my scrappy climb out of the lower class would allow me to handle on first sight all manner of eating utensil by imitating, chimpanzeelike, their movements.

Their bottomless cool—their cynical postures grown from privilege they were ungrateful for—could make me hate them. Born on third base, my daddy always said of the well off, and think they hit a home run.

I only breathe with one lung since you've gone , you say. And I love you with one hemisphere of my brain, the dumb one, the one that forgets.

Faced with a boy I had a crush on—a bow-legged Missouri cowboy with the face and form of young Marlon Brando—I eagerly took the tequila his friend handed me. Forgoing lime and salt, I tucked my hair behind my ears and tossed back a shot. As that one went down like bleach, I was holding up my glass for another.

Joyce's Portrait of the Artist

So I arrive alone alongside Daddy's home hospital bed. There's the bleach from the sheets and the air tinny with iodine. Under the air conditioner grind, his breathing is labored. Honeysuckle vines cling to the window screen, and a chameleon hangs by its claws.

Lo que más duele de la juventud no son las hostias que da el mundo, sino las estúpidas esperanzas que se hacen pasar por certezas.

Her stories will no doubt reconfirm the only sliver of irrefutable wisdom on the subject of kin The Liars' Club's odyssey has taught me, now oft-repeated: a dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.