230 Quotes by Mary Karr

Life is a field of corn. Literature is the shot glass it distills down into. Lorrie Moore.

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.

Effortless, excellence has to be. Tossed off, reflecting the ease you’re born to, which opposes what little I’ve garnered about comportment. I’m bred for farm work, and for such folk, the only A’s you get come from effort. Strife and strain are all the world can offer, and they temper you into something unbreakable, because Lord knows they’ll try – without let up – to break you.

I believe in God, but even if you don’t, you can believe in a self, the person who is innately who you are. Once you fully become that person, then everything you do will be blessed.

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.

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

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.

Age about 30, I stopped looking up my books in bookstores. Paying attention to the marketplace isn’t a healthy thing for me.

One can’t mount a stripper pole wearing a metal diving suit.