Mary Karr Quotes

15 Sourced Quotes

It strikes me that whatever advantages there are to being a boy—getting to stay out late and having other people wash your clothes and bring you plates of stuff—get undercut by having to play football.

Mary Karr
Everybody I know who wades deep enough into memory's waters drowns a little.

Mary Karr
Mother's particular devils had remained mysterious to me for decades. So had her past. Few born liars ever intentionally embark in truth's direction, even those who believe that such a journey might axiomatically set them free.

Mary Karr
At this point in literary history, it's understood that memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.

Mary Karr
A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.

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

Mary Karr
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.

Mary Karr
It turned out to be impossible for me to 'run away' in the sense other American teenagers did. Any movement at all was taken for progress in my family.

Mary Karr
Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild...

Mary Karr
One not-really-a-joke saying in my family is: 'The trouble started when you hit me back.'

Mary Karr
All drama depends on our need to connect with one another.

Mary Karr
I'm profoundly devoid of cool. I remember a poem about a suicidal dog, which began, 'Don't do it, dog.'

Mary Karr
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.

Mary Karr
We are in the grip of some big machine grinding us along. The force of it simplifies everything. A weird calm settled over me from inside out. What is about to happen has stood in line to happen. All the roads out of that instant have been closed, one by one.

Mary Karr
People who didn't live pre-Internet can't grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was.

Mary Karr