Quotes from Mary Karr

Silence can make somebody bigger, I've come to believe. Grief can, too. A big sad silence emanating from someone can cause you to invest that person with all manner of gravitas.)

Don't approach your history as something to be shaken for its cautionary fruit…Tell your stories, and your story will be revealed…Don't be afraid of appearing angry, small-minded, obtuse, mean, immoral, amoral, calculating, or anything else. Take no care for your dignity. Those were hard things for me to come by, and I offer them to you for what they may be worth.

A hawk reeled overhead with a rodent squirming in its beak, close enough so you could see the bird's black shiny eyes.

You're making an experience for a reader, a show that conjures your past—inside and out—with enough lucidity that a reader gets way more than just the brief flash of titillation. You owe a long journey, and most of all, you owe all the truth you can wheedle out of yourself.

I put just a teaspoon of catshit in your sandwich, but you didn't notice it at all." To my mind, a small bit of catshit equals a catshit sandwich, unless I know where the catshit is and can eat around it.

I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I'd been publishing for 20 years.

To promote a book so long after it's in print makes you—according to novelist Ian McEwan—an employee of your former self.

Yet through alcohol's alchemy, I'd swear some nights his shadowy form stands in the yard behind an old push-type lawn mower. Why'd you keep drinking? And Daddy, who was a shrugger, a starer into distances, shrugs and stares. You know…Then he dissolves into the falling snow. I upend the smooth bourbon, trying to achieve the same blunt, anesthetized state that once snuffed him out.

Your heart knows what your head don't. Or won't.

Later, I'l learn that's the structure of an elegy: lament, consolation; bad news, followed by good news.)

The lady in Chicago survived, she told me, through stories. Which is at the core of traditional therapy: retelling the family saga. Talk about it, the old wisdom says, and you get better. From narratives about childhood, this woman manufactured a self, neither cut off from her past nor mired in it.

personal experience has the possibility to transform both the tellers of it and the listeners to it. Just as the novel form once took up experiences of urban industrialized society that weren't being addressed in sermons or epistles or epic poems, so memoir—with its single, intensely personal voice—wrestles with family issues in a way readers of late find compelling.

She felt that Paolo's story would teach me a lesson, the punch line of which was something like divorcing a salary man for somebody who punches a clock was bad manners.

Los mejores están sin convicción, y los peores llenos de apasionada intensidad.

In terms of cathartic affect, memoir is like therapy, the difference being that in therapy, you pay them. The therapist is the mommy, and you're the baby. In memoir, you're the mommy, and the reader's the baby. And—hopefully—they pay you. ("No man but a blockhead ever wrote for any cause but money," Samuel Johnson said.)

whether you're a memoirist or not, there's a psychic cost for lopping yourself off from the past:

To bring oneself to others makes the whole planet less lonely. The nobility of everybody trying boggles the mind.

What the hell was wrong? Here I was, where I'd planned to be, but it felt like…like nothing. Some black and rotting cavity of wrongness still stank somewhere inside me. I could smell it but not name it.

She holds every dress briefly by its shoulders like it's a schoolkid she's checking out for smudges before church. Then one by one they get flung away from her and into the fire.

If you've got one foot in yesterday and one foot in tomorrow, you're straddling today—pissing all over it rather than living in it.

It's staring into one of those green screens, doing corporate budgets, that I notice how high salaries rise in marketing. Also, they spend hundreds of thousands on trade shows each year, and my product-manager girlfriend informs me that nobody pays attention to the budgets. So in the company library, I read a bunch of trade magazines and essentially retype what they said needs to happen into a proposal for managing that budget. Poof, I'm a marketeer.

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Mark Twain

The cans of bathroom cleaner they sold had faced the sun in their display pyramid for so long that their front labels had faded from lime green to pale lemon. The mouse-print instructions about not eating the stuff could no longer be read. "If swallowed—" each of the cans said, then there was just a wordless scorch mark as warning. At

I bent down the page, whose small triangle still marks the instant. Touching that triangle of yellowed paper today is like sliding my hand into the glove of my seventeen-year-old hand. Through magic, there are the Iowa fields slipping by with all the wholesome prosperity they represent. And there is my mother, not yet born into the ziplock baggie of ash my sister sent me years ago with the frank message Mom ½, written in laundry pen, since no one in our family ever stood on ceremony.