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.

The memoirist’s job is not to add explosive whammies on every page, but to help the average person come in.

In those days, I still enjoyed a child’s desperate tendency to put sparkles on my whole tribe.

When people suffer, their relationships usually suffer as well. Period. And we all suffer because, as the Buddha says, that’s the nature of being human and wanting stuff we don’t always get.

His silence hadn’t been helplessness – it hadn’t even been love. It had been pity.

Faith is a choice like any other. If you’re picking a career or a husband – or deciding whether to have a baby – there are feelings and reasons pro and con out the wazoo. But thinking it through is – at the final hour – horse dookey. You can only try out.

None of us can ever know the value of our lives, or how our separate and silent scribbling may add to the amenity of the world, if only by how radically it changes us, one and by one.

The week the local paper carried a story about the boy’s incarceration and lobotomy in the state hospital at Rusk, the guys at the refinery pitched the kid’s daddy a party complete with balloons and noisemakers.

Truth works a trip wire that permits the book to explode into being.