Quotes by Mary Karr

When youve been hurt enough as a kid (maybe at any age), its like you have a trick knee. Most of your life, you can function like an adult, but add in the right portions of sleeplessness and stress and grief, and the hurt, defeated self can bloom into place.

. . . for a good story, told often enough puts you in rooms youve never occupied.

Were not made to wallow in pleasure. Pleasure is joys assassin.

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.

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.

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.

But its a neurological fact that the scared self holds on while the reasoned one lets go.

Its hard to be an articulate ghost.

Slurping these spirits is soul preparation, a warped communion, myself serving as god, priest, and congregation.

Standing in the shower, I feel something on the back of my leg that turns out to be my ass.

I loved the idea that looking at a painting or listening to a concerto could make you somehow transcend the day-in, day-out bullshit that grinds you down: how in one instant of pure attention you could draw something inside that made you forever larger

That bar also delineated the realm of sweat and hourly wage, the working world that college was educating me to leave. Rewards in that realm were few. No one congratulated you for clocking out. Your salary was spare. The Legion served as recompense. So the physical comforts you bouth there—hot boudain sausage and cold beer—had value. You attended the place, by which I mean you not only went there but gave it attention your job didn’t deserve. Pool got shot not as metaphor for some corporate battle, but as itself alone. And the spiritual comforts-friendship, for instance—couldn’t be confused with payback for something you’d accomplished, for in the Legion everybody punched the same clock, drew the same wage, won the same prize.

The American religion-so far as there is one anymore-seems to be doubt. Whoever believes the least wins, because hell never be found wrong.

Just being out of the house with Daddy like this at Fishers lights me up enough for somebody to read by me.

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.

Bad things are gonna happen to you, because they happen to us all. And worrying wont stave the really bad things off. Dont make the mistake of comparing your twisted-up insides to other peoples 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.

A university is a city of ideas, and were grateful you became citizens of our city.

I think a dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.

Joy, it is, which Ive 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.

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