Quotes from Mary Karr

She was set on enduring, no matter what.she'd harden into whatever shape survival required.from that second forward, she had to figure what-all she'd have to lose for that survival, what-all and who.

I plugged quarters into the pool table, and the balls dropped with a fine thunder. I racked them extra tight, my fingertips wedged in the plastic triangle so not one loosened a notch when I finally raised the rack. A second later, Daddy broke solid but easy. The balls whacked around in sharp angles. They slowed up, and finally stopped with nothing sunk. I went to powder my hands. The can lid left a pattern of dots on my palm like white braille till I rubbed it in.

Real suffering has a face and a smell. It lasts in its most intense form no matter what you drape over it. And it knows your name.

It was a feminist act, revealing secrets in order to free herself and the women of her clan from the silence and obscurity to which a misogyny thousands of years old would have relegated them.

Words would define me, govern and determine me. Words warranted my devotion - not drugs, not boys. That's why I clung to the myth that poetry could somehow magically still my scrambled innards.

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: that of [man's] puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. William Faulkner

What hurts so bad about youth isn't the actual butt whippings the world delivers. It's the stupid hopes playacting like certainties.)

Then the game became guessing where the storm would hit, or, in local parlance, "go in," as if it were some stray relative in search of lodging.

But it's a neurological fact that the scared self holds on while the reasoned one lets go.

nothing matters but the quality of the affection— in the end—that has carved the trace in the mind dove

What I wrote was mostly unintelligible, except for one bit about a suicidal dog. The first line went, alliteratively enough, Don't do it, dog.

At the poetry readings Warren hosts for his job every few weeks, I swill plastic cups of vinegary white wine and yammer like somebody pulled a string on my neck till the library lights get turned off. After one such event, Warren drives home with his jawline flexing. What? What's the matter? I ask. Do you have to stay till the last drop is drunk? he says. His sole mention of my drinking, as I recall.

Mother tries to catch Warren's eyes in the rearview, saying, Warren, you've gotta come to Texas and see the pictures, of your wife. Do you think I look bad? You got in the back so quick I couldn't see you, he says. His eyes are fixed on the lights of Boston. Master of diplomacy, I say.

He said, My granny back in Tennessee was born with the web of a caul over her head like a wedding veil, and I come into this world wearing that same veil. I see what others don't. I am wed to the truth and a missionary of it.

Her mother's injunction on competing with other girls is a challenge, a gauntlet thrown down: You just have to be smarter than the ones who are prettier and prettier than the ones who are smarter

Maybe the girls in my gym class had been right all along, and poetry was a trick on smart people—a bunch of hooey, fawned over by whining fops of the most stick-up-the-ass variety.

There was a diet center that sported a plywood cutout of a pink pig wearing a brick-red polka-dot dress. The bubble coming from the pig's mouth held this phrase: A New Way To Lose Weight Without Starving To Death.

a dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it. In other words, the boat I can feel so lonely in actually holds us all.

I was only precocious mentally and lived in deadly fear of losing my virtue, not for moral reasons, but from the dread of being thought "easy.

No matter how many tangents he took or how far the tale flew from its starting point before he reeled it back, he had this gift: he knew how to be believed.

But I still feel awe for us—yes, for the masters who wrought lasting beauty from their hard lives, but for the rest of us, too, for the great courage all of us show in trying to wring some truth from the godawful mess of a single life. To bring oneself to others makes the whole planet less lonely. The nobility of everybody trying boggles the mind. And

Leechfield Will Grease The Planet!

Buckled into the driver's seat, he adjusts the rearview with microscopic precision before even cranking the ignition—a care that opposes my haphazard plowing around in an uninspected Vega, its heater pumping out enough monoxide to give passengers a metallic-tasting headache.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote for any cause but money," Samuel Johnson said.)