Top 140 Mary Karr Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I’m doomed to act like myself, even when it’s inconvenient!”

— Mary Karr

52. “The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop. Mark Twain.”

— Mary Karr

53. “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.”

— Mary Karr

54. “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.”

— Mary Karr

55. “I believe in God, but even if you don’t, you can believe in a self, the person who is innately who you are. Once you fully become that person, then everything you do will be blessed.”

— Mary Karr

56. “He never gave up on me, I only stopped being matriculated.”

— Mary Karr

57. “Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.”

— Mary Karr

58. “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.”

— Mary Karr

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

— Mary Karr

60. “Most great writers suffer and have no idea how good they are. Most bad writers are very confident. Be willing to be a child and be the Lilliputian in the world of Gulliver, the bat girl in Yankee Stadium. That’s a more fruitful way to be.”

— Mary Karr

61. “Why is it that everybody else is traffic?”

— Mary Karr

62. “If you let yourself tell those smaller anecdotes or stories, the overarching capital-S Story will eventually rise into view.”

— Mary Karr

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

— Mary Karr

64. “Real You is all you have, and all other paths are false. And in the best case, Real You is so happy to finally be recognized, it rewards you with Originality.”

— Mary Karr

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

— Mary Karr

66. “Your heart, Mary Karr, he’d say. His pen touched my sternum, and it felt for all the world like the point of a dull spear as he said, Your heart knows what your head don’t. Or won’t.”

— Mary Karr

67. “We are in the grip of some big machine grinding us along. The force of it simplifies everything. A weird calm settled over me from inside out. What is about to happen has stood in line to happen. All the roads out of that instant have been closed, one by one.”

— Mary Karr

68. “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.”

— Mary Karr

69. “The image pleases me enough : to slip from the body’s tight container and into some luminous womb, gliding there without effort till the distant shapes glow brighter and more familiar, till all your beloveds hover before you, their lit arms held out in welcome.”

— Mary Karr

70. “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.”

— Mary Karr

71. “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.”

— Mary Karr

72. “In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech – the only prayers said.”

— Mary Karr

73. “When people suffer, their relationships usually suffer as well. Period. And we all suffer because, as the Buddha says, that’s the nature of being human and wanting stuff we don’t always get.”

— Mary Karr

74. “I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world.”

— Mary Karr

75. “I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory a slippery hold.”

— Mary Karr

76. “When you do try to picture the boys who do ask you out, they’re absolutely featureless, like old carvings eroded by centuries of rain and wind.”

— Mary Karr

77. “Being smart and rich are lucky, but being curious and compassionate will save your ass. Being curious and compassionate can take you out of your ego and edge your soul towards wonder.”

— Mary Karr

78. “Every reporter who came up in legacy media can tell you about a come-to-Jesus moment when an editor put them up against a wall and tattooed a message deep into their skull: show respect for the fundamentals of the craft, or you would not soon be part of it.”

— Mary Karr

79. “As novelist Harry Crews once wrote, I’m the kind of person who – if he can’t have too much of something – doesn’t want any of it. In.”

— Mary Karr

80. “Bad things are gonna’ happen to you, because they happen to us all. And worrying won’t stave the really bad things off. Don’t make the mistake of comparing your twisted-up insides to other people’s blow-dried outsides. Even the most privileged person in this stadium suffers the torments of the damned just going about the business of being human.”

— Mary Karr

81. “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.”

— Mary Karr

82. “Faith is not a feeling, she says. It’s a set of actions. By taking the actions, you demonstrate more faith than somebody who actually has experienced the rewards of prayer and so feels hope.”

— Mary Karr

83. “I do have a really good memory. I mean, like, I can remember all the phone numbers of everybody on the street I grew up on.”

— Mary Karr

84. “None of us can ever know the value of our lives, or how our separate and silent scribbling may add to the amenity of the world, if only by how radically it changes us, one and by one.”

— Mary Karr

85. “Every day I feel more like some defeated matador limping out of the arena after I’ve been gored, or like some general coming back from a long battle.”

— Mary Karr

86. “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.”

— Mary Karr

87. “Metaphorically speaking, I always make room for any evidence of scurvy in my characters, any mitigating ailments.”

— Mary Karr

88. “I find a great deal of comfort and care in my faith and prayer. I’d sooner do without air than prayer.”

— Mary Karr

89. “What would you write if you weren’t afraid?”

— Mary Karr

90. “I tell people not to write too soon about their lives. Writing about yourself too young is loaded with psychological complexities.”

— Mary Karr

91. “They feed us the way the bread of communion does, with a nourishment that seems to form new flesh. According.”

— Mary Karr

92. “The head can travel a far piece while the body sits in one spot. It can traverse many decades, and many conversations can be had, even with the dead.”

— Mary Karr

93. “I threw away over 1,200 finished pages of my last memoir and broke the delete key on my keyboard changing my mind. If I had any balls at all, I’d make a brooch out of it.”

— Mary Karr

94. “Which ensures that life gets lived in miniature. In lieu of the large feelings – sorrow, fury, joy – I had their junior counterparts – anxiety, irritation, excitement. But.”

— Mary Karr

95. “It’s hard to be an articulate ghost.”

— Mary Karr

96. “The memoirist’s job is not to add explosive whammies on every page, but to help the average person come in.”

— Mary Karr

97. “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.”

— Mary Karr

98. “Mother – crazy as she was – had an exquisite sensibility. She read nonstop. Loads of history, Russian and Chinese particularly, and art history. There was nothing else to do in that suckhole of a town. You go outside, you run around, people throw dirt balls at you, you get your ass beat. But 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

99. “I’m bred for farm work, and for such folk, the only A’s you get come from effort. Strife and strain are all the world can offer, and they temper you into something unbreakable because Lord knows they’ll try – without let up – to break you.”

— Mary Karr

100. “I’ve said it’s hard. Here’s how hard: everybody I know who wades deep enough into memory’s waters drowns a little.”

— Mary Karr