230 Quotes by Mary Karr

How much smaller the large places are once we’re grown up, when we have car keys and credit cards.

Patti proposes that I pray to accept whatever reality I’m in, staying alert for practical solutions rather than issuing orders in prayer. It takes discipline to stop beseeching the heavens for wheelbarrows of gold.

Now try writing some pages to serve as later notes. Because you’re not yet sure of voice or anything else, you’re free from the need to squash in all manner of background information, explaining what year it is, etc. That stuff will just get you back in your head and drive you nuts. You’re free to write as if all that stuff is in the reader’s head already. It will be, by the time you get to this part of the book. You.

You are loved, someone said. Take that and eat it.

But because of you, I couldn’t die and couldn’t monster myself, either. So you were the agent of my rescue – not a good job for somebody barely three feet tall. Blameless.

Your mother rolls her eyes at the cat lapping grapefruit juice, says, Everything that comes into this house is crazy – whether we choose them for that or they get that way, I don’t know.

I don’t think I look like the pope’s favorite Catholic – at least not under close scrutiny.

Unless you’re a doubter and a worrier, a nail-biter, an apologizer, a rethinker, then memoir may not be your playpen. That’s the quality I’ve found most consistently in those life-story writers I’ve met.

Together we read Keats’s letters to his lost beloved about how the stitches on a cap she made him went through him like a spear. I lace my fingers with his. The average non-poetry devotee may think the intensity around this stuff off-kilter at the least, but for us, it’s like digging our hands together into a secret vat of pearls. In that realm only we are rich as any royalty.