230 Quotes by Mary Karr

The editor self thinks only of saving the reader time and shaping a powerful emotional experience.

Every now and then we enter the presence of the numinous and deduce for an instant how we’re formed, in what detail the force that infuses every petal might specifically run through us, wishing only to lure us into our full potential.

When you do try to picture the boys who do ask you out, they’re absolutely featureless, like old carvings eroded by centuries of rain and wind.

I’ve never contended that I had a really horrible life.

Far as I can tell, a dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.

No writer can impose his own standards onto any other, nor claim to speak for the whole genre.

I threw away over 1,200 finished pages of my last memoir and broke the delete key on my keyboard changing my mind. If I had any balls at all, I’d make a brooch out of it.

To my mind, a small bit of catshit equals a catshit sandwich, unless I know where the catshit is and can eat around it.

Most morally ominous: from the second you choose one event over another, you’re shaping the past’s meaning.