230 Quotes by Mary Karr

It’s hard to be an articulate ghost.

Still, a living, breathing human being – even a boneheaded or barely articulate one – conveys so much in person. The physical fact of a creature with heart thrumming and neurons flickering – what Shakespeare called the ‘poor, bare, forked animal’ – compels us all; we’re all hardwired in moments of empathy to see ourselves in another.

The difference between mad people and sane people,” Brave Orchid explained to the children, “is that sane people have variety when they talk story. Mad people have only one story that they talk over and over.” Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior.

At some point the talk got heated, and Paolo called Mother a strumpet, for which Daddy was said to have stomped a serious mudhole in Paolo’s ass.

I think about the story of Job I heard in Carol Sharp’s Sunday school. How he sort of learned to lean into feeling hurt at the end, the way you might lean into a heavy wind that almost winds up supporting you after a while.

Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else’s suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take communion, you make a community with others.

Why is it that everybody else is traffic?

I revise and revise and revise. Any editor of mine will tell you how crappy my early drafts are. Revisions are about clarifying and evoking feelings in the reader in the same way they were once evoked in me.

Dumb hope is what it hurts most to write, occupying the foolish schemes we pursued for decades, the blind alleys, the cliffs we stepped off.