Quotes from 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.

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.

Every reporter who came up in legacy media can tell you about a come-to-Jesus moment when an editor put them up against a wall and tattooed a message deep into their skull: show respect for the fundamentals of the craft, or you would not soon be part of it.

Mother—crazy as she was—had an exquisite sensibility. She read nonstop. Loads of history, Russian and Chinese particularly, and art history. There was nothing else to do in that suckhole of a town. You go outside, you run around, people throw dirt balls at you, you get your ass beat. But reading is socially accepted disassociation. You flip a switch and you're not there anymore. It's better than heroin. More effective and cheaper and legal.

Those are only rumors of suffering. 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.

The American religion—so far as there is one anymore—seems to be doubt. Whoever believes the least wins, because he'll never be found wrong.

The week the local paper carried a story about the boy's incarceration and lobotomy in the state hospital at Rusk, the guys at the refinery pitched the kid's daddy a party complete with balloons and noisemakers.

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

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

I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory a slippery hold.

A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. —Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

The difference between mad people and sane people," Brave Orchid explained to the children, "is that sane people have variety when they talk story. Mad people have only one story that they talk over and over." Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior

We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory. Louise Glück, "Nostos

During my short college stint, every time I picked up a pen, this grinding, unnamed fear overcame me—later identified as fear that my real self would spill out. One can't mount a stripper pole wearing a metal diving suit. What I needed to write kept simmering up while I wrote down everything but that. In fact, I kept ginning out reasons that writing reality was impossible. I cranked up therapy and drank like a fish.

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

His silence hadn't been helplessness—it hadn't even been love. It had been pity.

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

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.

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

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

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

sentimentality is only emotion you haven't proven to the reader—emotion without vivid evidence.

Why is it that everybody else is traffic?

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