Mary Karr Quotes

“Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But it could blow everybody's head off.”

“What hurts so bad about youth isn't the actual butt whippings the world delivers. It's the stupid hopes playacting like certainties.”

“But I'm not ready to stop listening to the screwed-up inner voice that's been ordering me around for a lifetime. My head thinks it can kill me… and go on living without me.”

“Ten years, she's dead, and I still find myself some mornings reaching for the phone to call her. She could no more be gone than gravity or the moon.”

“A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.”

“For me, everything's too much and nothing's enough.”

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

“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 shreiking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.”