230 Quotes by Mary Karr

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.

If you'd told me even a year before...that I'd wind up whispering my sins in the confessional or on my knees saying the rosary, I would've laughed myself cockeyed. More likely pastime?Pole dancer. International spy. Drug mule. Assassin.I drive under a sky black as graphite to meet my new spiritual director...a bulky Franciscan nun named Sister Margaret, patiently going blind behind fish-tank glasses that magnify her eyes like goggles.

If you live in the dark a long time and the sun comes out, you do not cross into it whistling. There's an initial uprush of relief at first, then-for me, anyway- a profound dislocation. My old assumptions about how the world works are buried, yet my new ones aren't yet operational.There's been a death of sorts, but without a few days in hell, no resurrection is possible.

Ten years, she's dead, and I still find myself some mornings reaching for the phone to call her. She could no more be gone than gravity or the moon.

Few born liars ever intentionally embark in truth’s direction, even those who believe that such a journey might axiomatically set them free.

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

Having devoted the first half of my life to the dark, I feel obliged to rever any pinpoint of light now.

Her mother's injunction on competing with other girls is a challenge, a gauntlet thrown down: "You just have to be smarter than the ones who are prettier and prettier than the ones who are smarter

. . . for a good story, told often enough puts you in rooms you've never occupied.