Quotes from Mary Karr

Together we read Keats's letters to his lost beloved about how the stitches on a cap she made him went through him like a spear. I lace my fingers with his. The average non-poetry devotee may think the intensity around this stuff off-kilter at the least, but for us, it's like digging our hands together into a secret vat of pearls. In that realm only we are rich as any royalty.

Maybe it fostered in me a creeping ambition-deficit disorder, but it could ease an ache. So anything worth doing could be undertaken later. Paint the apartment, write a book, quit booze, sure: tomorrow. Which

Which ensures that life gets lived in miniature. In lieu of the large feelings—sorrow, fury, joy—I had their junior counterparts—anxiety, irritation, excitement. But

Height - ours and our boyfriends - is a running contest between Lecia and me. If I tell her good news about myself, she's liable to say 'I'm five-nine' and hang up.

But because of you, I couldn't die and couldn't monster myself, either. So you were the agent of my rescue—not a good job for somebody barely three feet tall. Blameless

I've plumb forgot where I am for an instant, which is how a good lie should take you.

I pushed the button to shut the TV off. The picture shrank to a little blue star that hurtled backwards through the swampy dark.

As with everything I've ever written, I start out paralyzed by fear of failure. The tarantula ego—starving to be shored up by praise—tries to scare me away from saying simply whatever small, true thing is standing in line for me to say.

My family, I thought them to be, for such was my quest—a family I could stand alongside pondering the sea. We stood as the blue water surged toward us in six-foot coils.

have added something to knowledge and helped others to add more; and these somethings have a value that differs in degree only, and not in kind, from that of the creations of the great mathematicians, or any of the other artists, great or small, who have left some kind of memorial behind them.

Slurping these spirits is soul preparation, a warped communion, myself serving as god, priest, and congregation.

I ALMOST FELT A WEIRD POWER OVER MOTHER DURING SUCH TIME. SHE HAD A HOLD ON ME, AT LEAST. AND HER GRIP FELT LIKE SHE WOULD HANG ON NO MATTER WHAT I YANKED HER THROUGH. BY THIS TIME IT WAS HURRICANE SEASON.

for a good story, told often enough puts you in rooms you've never occupied.

Students love trying to imitate Nabokov, which teaches them a lot—mostly about why not to imitate somebody wired so differently from yourself. Nabokov wannabes don't sound just like turds, but like pretentious turds. The writer's best voice will grow from embracing her own "you-ness"—which I call talent, and which is best expressed in voice. Which

Later, Mother patted my back as I threw up into the toilet. I remember the smell of Jergen's lotion from her hands, and how the tenderness of her gesture repelled me even as part of me hungered for it. I passed out sending prayers up at machine-gun speed, like a soldier in a foxhole to a god not believed in, Don't let me be her, don't let me be her. For however she'd pulled herself together for this trip, she could blow at any second.

A curious mind probing for truth may well set your scribbling ass free.

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

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.

You can do "research," i.e. postponing writing, till Jesus dons a nightie. But your memoir's real enemy is blinking back at you from the shaving glass when you floss at night—your ignorant ego and its myriad masks.

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

However many intellectual pleasures a book may offer up, it's usually your emotional connection to the memoir's narrator that hooks you in. And how does she do that? A good writer can conjure a landscape and its peoples to live inside you, and the best writers make you feel they've disclosed their soft underbellies. Seeing someone naked thrills us a little.

At unexpected points in life, everyone gets waylaid by the colossal force of recollection.

The word daddy hung in the air outlined in gold. Closing my eyes, I found it in blue on my eyelids. I could feel the roots my daddy had grown in me—actual branches in my body. His was the ethos of country folk: people who kept raked dirt yards rather than grassy lawns because growing grass was too much like field work; people who kept the icebox on the porch, plugged in with an extension cord run through a window, so folks driving by would know they had one.