230 Quotes by Mary Karr

I loved the idea that looking at a painting or listening to a concerto could make you somehow "transcend" the day-in, day-out bullshit that grinds you down; how in one instant of pure attention you could draw something inside that made you forever larger.

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.

When you've been hurt enough as a kid (maybe at any age), it's like you have a trick knee. Most of your life, you can function like an adult, but add in the right portions of sleeplessness and stress and grief, and the hurt, defeated self can bloom into place.

If we didn't read people who were bastards, we'd never read anything. Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.

Just being out of the house with Daddy like this at Fisher's lights me up enough for somebody to read by me.

Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.

But it’s a neurological fact that the scared self holds on while the reasoned one lets go. The adrenaline that let our ancestors escape the sabertooth tiger sears into the meat of our brains the extraordinary, the loud. The shrieking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.

We're not made to wallow in pleasure. Pleasure is joy's assassin.

Joy, it is, which I’ve never known before, only pleasure or excitement. Joy is a different thing, because its focus exists outside the self – delight in something external, not satisfaction of some inner craving.