Quotes from Mary Karr

A pool game mixes ritual with geometry.

Charm is from the Latin carmen: to sing. By "charm," I mean sing well enough to hold the reader in thrall. Whatever people like about you in the world will manifest itself on the page. What drives them crazy will keep you humble. You'll need both sides of yourself—the beautiful and the beastly—to hold a reader's attention.

Born on third base, my daddy always said of the well off, and they think they hit a home run.

I once heard Don DeLillo quip that a fiction writer starts with meaning and then manufactures events to represent it; a memoirist starts with events, then derives meaning from them.

He was so proud that she had more going on north of her neck than her hairdo.

What would you write if you weren't afraid?

Your mother rolls her eyes at the cat lapping grapefruit juice, says, Everything that comes into this house is crazy - whether we choose them for that or they get that way, I don't know.

I couldn't have been more than six, but I was calling her an ignorant little bitch. Her momma stood on the porch step shaking her mop at me and saying there were snakes and lizards coming out of my mouth, to which I said i didn't give a shit.

The trick in that town was getting through a night at all without stalling in the sludge of your own thoughts.

The words and sentences you take into your body from books are no less sacred and healing than communion. Surely at least one such person lives in your zip code.

Who but a drunk, I wonder looking back, could sit on the porch alone and get in an argument?)

Real You is all you have, and all other paths are false. And in the best case, Real You is so happy to finally be recognized, it rewards you with Originality.

The fact that my house was Not Right metastasized into the notion that I myself was somehow Not Right, or that my survival in the world depended on my constant vigilance against various forms of Not-Rightness.

But most of the time, we keep memories packed away. I sometimes liken that moment of sudden unpacking to circus clowns pouring out of a miniature car trunk—how did so much fit into such a small space?

If you let yourself tell those smaller anecdotes or stories, the overarching capital-S Story will eventually rise into view.

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 instinctively knew were vanishing. (I know, I know. Psychoanalytic theory would label this pecker envy and seek to smack me on the nose with it. To that I'd say, o please. Of actual johnsons I had little awareness. What I coveted was privilege.)

I exhale a highway of smoke and stare down it, then say, Each day has just been survival, just getting through, standing it. Don't you see how savage that sounds? Like, that's the way men in prison yards think. You live in a rich suburb and teach literature.

Finally, put it aside. Put it out of your head at least a week. You want it to set up like jello. And when you pick it back up, ask yourself, What haven't I said? How might someone else involved have seen it differently?

Life is a field of corn. Literature is the shot glass it distills down into. Lorrie Moore

Memoir done right is an art, a made thing. It's not just raw reportage flung splat on the page.

Patti proposes that I pray to accept whatever reality I'm in, staying alert for practical solutions rather than issuing orders in prayer. It takes discipline to stop beseeching the heavens for wheelbarrows of gold

A university is a city of ideas, and we're grateful you became citizens of our city.

Every day I feel more like some defeated matador limping out of the arena after I've been gored, or like some general coming back from a long battle.

Joy, it is, which I've never known before, only pleasure or excitement. Joy is a different thing, because its focus exists outside the self – delight in something external, not satisfaction of some inner craving.