230 Quotes by Mary Karr

I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I’d been publishing for 20 years.

You can be a slave to current magazines or a slave to history.

I’ve said it’s hard. Here’s how hard: everybody I know who wades deep enough into memory’s waters drowns a little.

Memoir done right is an art, a made thing. It’s not just raw reportage flung splat on the page.

The fact that my house was Not Right metastasized into the notion that I myself was somehow Not Right, or that my survival in the world depended on my constant vigilance against various forms of Not-Rightness.

Which ensures that life gets lived in miniature. In lieu of the large feelings – sorrow, fury, joy – I had their junior counterparts – anxiety, irritation, excitement. But.

I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory a slippery hold.

The image pleases me enough : to slip from the body’s tight container and into some luminous womb, gliding there without effort till the distant shapes glow brighter and more familiar, till all your beloveds hover before you, their lit arms held out in welcome.

I’d spent way more years worrying about how to look like a poet – buying black clothes, smearing on scarlet lipstick, languidly draping myself over thrift-store furniture – than I had learning how to assemble words in some discernible order.