Top 140 Mary Karr Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Mary Karr

2. “When I got sober, I thought giving up was saying goodbye to all the fun and all the sparkle, and it turned out to be just the opposite. That’s when the sparkle started for me.”

— Mary Karr

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3. “Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild...”

— Mary Karr

4. “That’s what’s so gorgeous about humanity. It doesn’t matter how bleak our daily lives are, we still fight for the light. I think that’s our divinity. We lean into love, even in the most hideous circumstances. We manage to hope.”

— Mary Karr

5. “Life is a field of corn. Literature is the shot glass it distills down into. Lorrie Moore.”

— Mary Karr

6. “Childhood was terrifying for me. A kid has no control. You’re three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, and illiterate. Terror snaps you awake. You pay keen attention. People can just pick you up and move you and put you down.”

— Mary Karr

7. “Every now and then we enter the presence of the numinous and deduce for an instant how we’re formed, in what detail the force that infuses every petal might specifically run through us, wishing only to lure us into our full potential.”

— Mary Karr

8. “Those are only rumors of suffering. Real suffering has a face and a smell. It lasts in the most intense form no matter what you drape over it. And it knows your name.”

— Mary Karr

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

— Mary Karr

10. “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.”

— Mary Karr

11. “There’s a space at the bottom of an exhale, a little hitch between taking in and letting out that’s a perfect zero you can go into. There’s a rest point between the heart muscle’s close and open – an instant of keenest living when you’re momentarily dead. You can rest there.”

— Mary Karr

12. “Most morally ominous: from the second you choose one event over another, you’re shaping the past’s meaning.”

— Mary Karr

13. “Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he cannot distinguish the truth within him or around him, and so loses respect for himself. And having no respect, he ceases to love. Fyodor Dostoevsky.”

— Mary Karr

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

— Mary Karr

15. “There are women succeeding beyond their wildest dreams because of their sobriety.”

— Mary Karr

16. “A pool game mixes ritual with geometry.”

— Mary Karr

17. “It turned out to be impossible for me to ‘run away’ in the sense other American teenagers did. Any movement at all was taken for progress in my family.”

— Mary Karr

18. “We’re not made to wallow in pleasure. Pleasure is joy’s assassin.”

— Mary Karr

19. “Writing, regardless of the end result – whether good or bad, published or not, well reviewed or slammed – means celebrating beauty in an often ugly world.”

— Mary Karr

20. “The American religion-so far as there is one anymore-seems to be doubt. Whoever believes the least wins, because he’ll never be found wrong.”

— Mary Karr

21. “The emotional stakes a memoirist bets with could not be higher, and it’s physically enervating. I nap on a daily basis like a cross-country trucker.”

— Mary Karr

22. “I’ve never contended that I had a really horrible life.”

— Mary Karr

23. “I get about five memoirs per week in my mailbox, and few of them inspire anything but a desire to pick up the channel changer.”

— Mary Karr

24. “Im always terrified when Im writing.”

— Mary Karr

25. “Reading is socially accepted disassociation. You flip a switch and you’re not there anymore. It’s better than heroin. More effective and cheaper and legal.”

— Mary Karr

26. “People who didn’t live pre-Internet can’t grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. I stopped in the middle of the SAT to memorize a poem, because I thought, This is a great work of art and I’ll never see it again.”

— Mary Karr

27. “I lock all my scaredness down in my stomach until the fear hardens into something I hardly notice. I myself harden into a person that I hardly notice.”

— Mary Karr

28. “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.”

— Mary Karr

29. “Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life.”

— Mary Karr

30. “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it. Zora Neale Hurston.”

— Mary Karr

31. “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.”

— Mary Karr

32. “Be willing to be a child and be the Lilliputian in the world of Gulliver.”

— Mary Karr

33. “Far as I can tell, a dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.”

— Mary Karr

34. “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.”

— Mary Karr

35. “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.”

— Mary Karr

36. “I get so lonely sometimes, I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger.”

— Mary Karr

37. “If dysfunction means that a family doesn’t work, then every family ambles into some arena in which that happens, where relationships get strained or even break down entirely. We fail each other or disappoint each other. That goes for parents, siblings, kids, marriage partners – the whole enchilada.”

— Mary Karr

38. “Mother’s particular devils had remained mysterious to me for decades. So had her past. Few born liars ever intentionally embark in truth’s direction, even those who believe that such a journey might axiomatically set them free.”

— Mary Karr

39. “Faith is a choice like any other. If you’re picking a career or a husband – or deciding whether to have a baby – there are feelings and reasons pro and con out the wazoo. But thinking it through is – at the final hour – horse dookey. You can only try out.”

— Mary Karr

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

— Mary Karr

41. “A university is a city of ideas, and we’re grateful you became citizens of our city.”

— Mary Karr

42. “I once heard Don DeLillo quip that a fiction writer starts with meaning and then manufactures events to represent it; a memoirist starts with events, then derives meaning from them.”

— Mary Karr

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

— Mary Karr

44. “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.”

— Mary Karr

45. “Literature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, whereas literature teaches us to notice. Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life. James Wood, How Fiction Works As.”

— Mary Karr

46. “Having devoted the first half of my life to the dark, I feel obliged to rever any pinpoint of light now.”

— Mary Karr

47. “To my mind, a small bit of catshit equals a catshit sandwich, unless I know where the catshit is and can eat around it.”

— Mary Karr

48. “Nobody sounds good writing about your divorce, let’s face it.”

— Mary Karr

49. “The words and sentences you take into your body from books are no less sacred and healing than communion. Surely at least one such person lives in your zip code.”

— Mary Karr

50. “One can’t mount a stripper pole wearing a metal diving suit.”

— Mary Karr