Top 140 Mary Karr Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “But most of the time, we keep memories packed away. I sometimes liken that moment of sudden unpacking to circus clowns pouring out of a miniature car trunk – how did so much fit into such a small space?”

— Mary Karr

102. “I think we fall in love and become adults and become citizens in a way by writing stories about ourselves.”

— Mary Karr

103. “You can be a slave to current magazines or a slave to history.”

— Mary Karr

104. “Memoir done right is an art, a made thing. It’s not just raw reportage flung splat on the page.”

— Mary Karr

105. “I jerked huffing in air to holler, but the scream got stuck, just added itself onto the large round scream that all my life had been assembling in my chest.”

— Mary Karr

106. “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.”

— Mary Karr

107. “Finally, put it aside. Put it out of your head at least a week. You want it to set up like jello. And when you pick it back up, ask yourself, What haven’t I said? How might someone else involved have seen it differently?”

— Mary Karr

108. “If your goal is to polish up a fake person you can sell to a public you perceive as dumb, the unexamined life will do perfectly well, thank you.”

— Mary Karr

109. “Charm is from the Latin carmen: to sing. By “charm,” I mean sing well enough to hold the reader in thrall. Whatever people like about you in the world will manifest itself on the page. What drives them crazy will keep you humble. You’ll need both sides of yourself – the beautiful and the beastly – to hold a reader’s attention.”

— Mary Karr

110. “Writing the real self seldom seems original enough when you first happen on it.”

— Mary Karr

111. “In some ways, writing a memoir is knocking yourself out with your own fist, if it’s done right.”

— Mary Karr

112. “The week the local paper carried a story about the boy’s incarceration and lobotomy in the state hospital at Rusk, the guys at the refinery pitched the kid’s daddy a party complete with balloons and noisemakers.”

— Mary Karr

113. “Tomorrow! How sweet its prospects for a drunkard the night before. There is no better word. Before the earth hurls itself into sunshine, nothing is not possible.”

— Mary Karr

114. “At some point the talk got heated, and Paolo called Mother a strumpet, for which Daddy was said to have stomped a serious mudhole in Paolo’s ass.”

— Mary Karr

115. “You think you know the story so well. It’s a mansion inside your head, each room just waiting to be described, but pretty much every memoirist I’ve ever talked to finds the walls of such rooms changing shape around her. There are shattering earthquakes, tectonic-plate-type shifts. Or it’s like memory is a snow globe that invariably gets shaken so as to shroud the events inside.”

— Mary Karr

116. “I’m not nearly smart enough or imaginative enough to tackle the novel form. Never happen.”

— Mary Karr

117. “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.”

— Mary Karr

118. “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.”

— Mary Karr

119. “Truth works a trip wire that permits the book to explode into being.”

— Mary Karr

120. “Maybe it fostered in me a creeping ambition-deficit disorder, but it could ease an ache. So anything worth doing could be undertaken later. Paint the apartment, write a book, quit booze, sure: tomorrow. Which.”

— Mary Karr

121. “Age about 30, I stopped looking up my books in bookstores. Paying attention to the marketplace isn’t a healthy thing for me.”

— Mary Karr

122. “The editor self thinks only of saving the reader time and shaping a powerful emotional experience.”

— Mary Karr

123. “It strikes me that whatever advantages there are to being a boy – getting to stay out late and having other people wash your clothes and bring you plates of stuff – get undercut by having to play football.”

— Mary Karr

124. “The truth is when I went to graduate school I would’ve said I was among the least talented of the students, I was certainly the least smart, or less educated. But I worked very hard.”

— Mary Karr

125. “His silence hadn’t been helplessness – it hadn’t even been love. It had been pity.”

— Mary Karr

126. “Height – ours and our boyfriends – is a running contest between Lecia and me. If I tell her good news about myself, she’s liable to say ‘I’m five-nine’ and hang up.”

— Mary Karr

127. “The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold.”

— Mary Karr

128. “Still, a living, breathing human being – even a boneheaded or barely articulate one – conveys so much in person. The physical fact of a creature with heart thrumming and neurons flickering – what Shakespeare called the ‘poor, bare, forked animal’ – compels us all; we’re all hardwired in moments of empathy to see ourselves in another.”

— Mary Karr

129. “I don’t have a copy of my books, and the degree to which I never read them is profound. I never look.”

— Mary Karr

130. “As a memoirist, I strive for veracity.”

— Mary Karr

131. “Effortless, excellence has to be. Tossed off, reflecting the ease you’re born to, which opposes what little I’ve garnered about comportment. 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

132. “In those days, I still enjoyed a child’s desperate tendency to put sparkles on my whole tribe.”

— Mary Karr

133. “Having a great dad probably permitted me to pal around with guys in a way that some women don’t.”

— Mary Karr

134. “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.”

— Mary Karr

135. “No writer can impose his own standards onto any other, nor claim to speak for the whole genre.”

— Mary Karr

136. “Put your mind where your body is. One day at a time forces you to reckon with the instant you actually occupy, rather than living in fantasy la-la that never comes.”

— Mary Karr

137. “I’ve plumb forgot where I am for an instant, which is how a good lie should take you.”

— Mary Karr

138. “The best memoirists stress the subjective nature of reportage. Doubt and wonder come to stand as part of the story.”

— Mary Karr

139. “In a great memoir, some aspect of the writer’s struggle for self often serves as the book’s organizing principle, and the narrator’s battle to become whole rages over the book’s trajectory.”

— Mary Karr

140. “The goal of a voice is to speak not with objective authority but with subjective curiosity.”

— Mary Karr

141. “For the more haunted among us, only looking back at the past can permit it finally to become past.”

— Mary Karr

142. “Love is the only passion which includes in its dreams the happiness of someone else.”

— Mary Karr