230 Quotes by Mary Karr

If you lie to your husband - even about something so banal as how much you drink - each lie is a brick in a wall going up between you, and when he tells you he loves you, it's deflected away.

But I'm not ready to stop listening to the screwed-up inner voice that's been ordering me around for a lifetime. My head thinks it can kill me... and go on living without me.

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.

The shreiking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.

The truth is when I went to graduate school I would've said I was among the least talented of the students, I was certainly the least smart, or less educated. But I worked very hard.

How much smaller the large places are once we're grown up, when we have car keys and credit cards.

Memoir is not an act of history, but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.

Your heart, Mary Karr, he'd say. His pen touched my sternum, and it felt for all the world like the point of a dull spear as he said, Your heart knows what your head don't. Or won't.

I think we fall in love and become adults and become citizens in a way by writing stories about ourselves.