Quotes from Mary Karr

When you do try to picture the boys who do ask you out, they're absolutely featureless, like old carvings eroded by centuries of rain and wind.

Any time you try to collapse the distance between your delusions about the past and what really happened, there is suffering involved. p. xx

our strange cynicism about truth as a possibility has permitted us to accept all manner of bullshit

You think you know the story so well. It's a mansion inside your head, each room just waiting to be described, but pretty much every memoirist I've ever talked to finds the walls of such rooms changing shape around her. There are shattering earthquakes, tectonic-plate-type shifts. Or it's like memory is a snow globe that invariably gets shaken so as to shroud the events inside.

Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild, elsewise every raped baby would grow up to raped.

Far as I can tell, a dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.

Writing the real self seldom seems original enough when you first happen on it.

I threw away over 1,200 finished pages of my last memoir and broke the delete key on my keyboard changing my mind. If I had any balls at all, I'd make a brooch out of it.

Asking me how to write a memoir is a little like saying, "I really want to have sex, where do I start?" What one person fantasizes about would ruin the romance for another.

You are loved, someone said. Take that and eat it.

But it's a neurological fact that the scared self holds on while the reasoned one lets go. The adrenaline that let our ancestors escape the sabertooth tiger sears into the meat of our brains the extraordinary, the loud. The shrieking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.

Now try writing some pages to serve as later notes. Because you're not yet sure of voice or anything else, you're free from the need to squash in all manner of background information, explaining what year it is, etc. That stuff will just get you back in your head and drive you nuts. You're free to write as if all that stuff is in the reader's head already. It will be, by the time you get to this part of the book. You

The editor self thinks only of saving the reader time and shaping a powerful emotional experience.

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.

Unless you're like my friend, poet Brooks Haxton (who translates Greek, Latin, French, Hebrew, and German), throwing in three-dollar words will just make you look like a dick.

The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop. Mark Twain

If your goal is to polish up a fake person you can sell to a public you perceive as dumb, the unexamined life will do perfectly well, thank you.

When you've been hurt enough as a kid (maybe at any age), it's like you have a trick knee. Most of your life, you can function like an adult, but add in the right portions of sleeplessness and stress and grief, and the hurt, defeated self can bloom into place.

Effortless, excellence has to be. Tossed off, reflecting the ease you're born to, which opposes what little I've garnered about comportment. I'm bred for farm work, and for such folk, the only A's you get come from effort. Strife and strain are all the world can offer, and they temper you into something unbreakable, because Lord knows they'll try--without let up--to break you.

The image pleases me enough : to slip from the body's tight container and into some luminous womb, gliding there without effort till the distant shapes glow brighter and more familiar, till all your beloveds hover before you, their lit arms held out in welcome.

Put your mind where your body is. One day at a time forces you to reckon with the instant you actually occupy, rather than living in fantasy la-la that never comes.

Having devoted the first half of my life to the dark, I feel obliged to rever any pinpoint of light now.

It's hard to be an articulate ghost.

Novels have intricate plots, verse has musical forms, history and biography enjoy the sheen of objective truth. In memoir, one event follows another. Birth leads to puberty leads to sex. The books are held together by happenstance, theme, and (most powerfully) the sheer, convincing poetry of a single person trying to make sense of the past.