Quotes by Mary Karr

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

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.

it was dawning on me how uphill a poets path was, and I confessed to her that if I had to be the choice between being happy or being a poet, Id choose to be happy.

What hurts so bad about youth isnt the actual butt whippings the world delivers. Its the stupid hopes playacting like certainties.

Ten years, shes 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.

Id 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.

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 everybodys head off.

Faith is not a feeling, she says. Its 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.

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.

Im bred for farm work, and for such folk, the only As you get come from effort. Strife and strain are all the world can offer, and they temper you into something unbreakable because Lord knows theyll try -- without let up -- to break you.

I liked to call myself a poet and had affected a habit of reading classical texts (in translation, of course – I was a lazy student). I would ride the Greyhound for thirty-six hours down from the Midwest to Leechfield, then spend days dressed in black in the scalding heat of my mother’s front porch reading Homer (or Ovid or Virgil) and waiting for someone to ask me what I was reading. No one ever did. People asked me what I was drinking, how much I weighed, where I was living, and if I had married yet, but no one gave me a chance to deliver my lecture on Great Literature.

If we didnt read people who were bastards, wed never read anything. Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.

If you live in the dark a long time and the sun comes out, you do not cross into it whistling. Theres an initial uprush of relief at first, then-for me, anyway- a profound dislocation. My old assumptions about how the world works are buried, yet my new ones arent yet operational.Theres been a death of sorts, but without a few days in hell, no resurrection is possible.

But what if I dont believe in God? Its like theyve sat me in front of a mannequin and said, Fall in love with him. You cant will feeling. What Jack says issues from some still, true place that could not be extinguished by all the schizophrenia his genetic code could muster. It sounds something like this. Get on your knees and find some quiet space inside yourself, a little sunshine right about here. Jack holds his hands in a ball shape about midchest, saying, Let go. Surrender, Dorothy, the witch wrote in the sky. Surrender, Mary. I want to surrender but have no idea what that means. He goes on with a level gaze and a steady tone: Yield up what scares you. Yield up what makes you want to scream and cry. Enter into that quiet. Its a cathedral. Its an empty football stadium with all the lights on. And pray to be an instrument of peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is conflict, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair hope... What if I get no answer there? If God hasnt spoken, do nothing. Fulfill the contract you entered into at the box factory, amen. Make the containers you promised to tape and staple. Go quietly and shine. Wait. Those not impelled to act must remain in the cathedral. Dont be lonely. I get so lonely sometimes, I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger ...

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

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.

If youd told me even a year before...that Id wind up whispering my sins in the confessional or on my knees saying the rosary, I wouldve laughed myself cockeyed. More likely pastime?Pole dancer. International spy. Drug mule. Assassin.I drive under a sky black as graphite to meet my new spiritual director...a bulky Franciscan nun named Sister Margaret, patiently going blind behind fish-tank glasses that magnify her eyes like goggles.

Few born liars ever intentionally embark in truth’s direction, even those who believe that such a journey might axiomatically set them free.

I think about the story of Job I heard in Carol Sharps 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.