Lit Quotes

“If you live in the dark a long time and the sun comes out, you do not cross into it whistling. There's 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 aren't yet operational.There's been a death of sorts, but without a few days in hell, no resurrection is possible.”
― Mary Karr, Lit

“What hurts so bad about youth isn't the actual butt whippings the world delivers. It's the stupid hopes playacting like certainties.”
― Mary Karr, Lit

“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, Lit

“For me, everything's too much and nothing's enough.”
― Mary Karr, Lit

“But I'm not ready to stop listening to the screwed-up inner voice that's been ordering me around for a lifetime. My head thinks it can kill me... and go on living without me. ”
― Mary Karr, Lit

“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, Lit

“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, Lit

“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, Lit

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

“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, Lit

“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, Lit

“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, Lit

“How much smaller the large places are once we're grown up, when we have car keys and credit cards.”
― Mary Karr, Lit

“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, Lit

“We're not made to wallow in pleasure. Pleasure is joy's assassin.”
― Mary Karr, Lit

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

“He never gave up on me, I only stopped being matriculated.”
― Mary Karr, Lit

“Standing in the shower, I feel something on the back of my leg that turns out to be my ass.”
― Mary Karr, Lit

“Born on third base, my daddy always said of the well off, and they think they hit a home run.”
― Mary Karr, Lit

“(Who but a drunk, I wonder looking back, could sit on the porch alone and get in an argument?)”
― Mary Karr, Lit

“I exhale a highway of smoke and stare down it, then say, Each day has just been survival, just getting through, standing it.

Don’t you see how savage that sounds? Like, that’s the way men in prison yards think. You live in a rich suburb and teach literature.”
― Mary Karr, Lit

“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, Lit

“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. Fake it till you make it.”
― Mary Karr, Lit

“I fixed her a drink, then lowered myself on the spider's silk of my attention back into One Hundred Years of Solitude and the adventures of the Buendia family. The scene where the prodigal Jose Arcadio hoisted his adopted sister by her waist into his hammock and, in my translation, 'quartered her like a little bird' made my face hot. I bent down the page, whose small triangle marks the instant.

Touching that triangle of yellowed paper today is like sliding my hand into the glove of my seventeen-year-old hand. Through magic, there are the Iowa fields slipping by... And there is my mother, not yet born into the ziplock baggie of ash my sister sent me years ago with the frank message 'Mom 1/2', written in laundry pen, since no-one in our family ever stood on ceremony.”
― Mary Karr, Lit

“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, Lit

“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, Lit

“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, Lit

“If you'd told me even a year before...that I'd wind up whispering my sins in the confessional or on my knees saying the rosary, I would've 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.”
― Mary Karr, Lit

“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, Lit

“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, Lit