Best Lit Quotes by Mary Karr

"Any way I tell this story is a lie, so I ask you to disconnect the device in your head that repeats at intervals how ancient and addled I am."

"Through that fishbowl lens, you’ve been looking for the truth most of your life."

"However long I’ve been granted sobriety, however many hours I logged in therapists’ offices and the confessional, I’ve still managed to hurt you."

"Your birth altered my whole posture on the planet, not to mention my role vis-à-vis Mother."

"The time I’m mostly thinking of, you were barely four, which—I would argue—is less like being a miniature person than like a dog or cat who can talk."

"That’s the story I want to tell: how I started getting drunk. How being drunk got increasingly hard, and being not drunk felt impossible."

"As you get older, you look at me more objectively—or try to. As I become strange to you in some ways, you’ve become more familiar to yourself."

"You’re disembarking now, I can see it. Maybe by telling you my story, you can better tell yours, which is the only way to get home, by which I mean to get free of us."

"The fevers my year-old son gets every few weeks can spike to 105°, which means waking the husband, a frantic trip to Children’s Hospital, a sleepless night in the waiting room."

"Not one thing on the planet operates as I would have it, and only here can I plot my counterattacks."

"Problem five, the husband: Should he come home early after work and grad school, should he round the corner and peer in with an expectant grin, I’ll shoo him away."

"I adapted to Daddy’s absence partly by smoking enough reefer to float me through a house where—increasingly—nobody’s path intersected with another."

"All my life I’d met people bearing wounds far deeper than my own. I’d thought California would change me, heal me, free me from attracting all that."

"What hurts so bad about youth isn’t the actual butt whippings the world delivers. It’s the stupid hopes playacting like certainties."

"Even then I knew to say, What family is like ours?"

"You can’t go now. I’m not done with you yet."

"You start with a darkness to move through but sometimes the darkness moves through you."

"The only reason I’d come there was to write, but I’d refused to sign up for a lit class, being too ill read not to shame myself."

"Words warranted my devotion—not drugs, not boys."

"People should like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if poets wrote it."

"The truth was, if it helped with money, Daddy would sign me over in a heartbeat. I was the one who couldn’t bear legally lopping myself off from an upbringing I was working so hard to shed."

"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."

"You wear a mask, and your face grows to fit it."

"You're still promising until your first book's out."

"If I had to choose between being happy or being a poet, I'd choose to be happy."

"The only way to shovel through the heaps of work was to stay sober."

"I felt like a charwoman but tried to play it off as if we were equals."

"Shakespeare meets Superman? He might as well walk out with his hands up."

"Come live with me and be my love...The sixteenth-century version of Hubba, hubba, sweetcakes."

"If I remember right, the gardener even grew up on the estate."

"Silence rolls across us like a gray sea fog."

"The old man was on a horse again the next morning."

"At that time my family is broke out in the kind of misery common to sharecroppers in Faulkner novels."

"Poetry will deliver him from his stultifying fate as it will me from my turbulent one."

"I wouldn't call my pre-Warren drinking out of control because I had control."

"Lying alongside Warren that night, I again resolve to generate income, really get serious about it."

"The shrieking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water."

"Cambridge can make history come alive to you with its parade of big-deal writers."

"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."

"She’s in good hands with Curtis, Richard says."

"And with that, I tell him how—visiting me once at college—Mother got gunched out of her brains with my pals."

"It’s so easy to picture her and Harold reeling down the road from Get Down Brown’s like they were in bumper cars."

"The me Daddy knew doesn’t exist in Warren’s house, which is maybe why my husband didn’t come down on this mission—down being the operative word."

"Daddy’s eyes lock on mine. He says one word to me, and it must meander through his skull a long time, searching through the ruined brain to find the perfect monosyllabic curse."

"He shakes his head with a stiff, persistent fraction of a smile."

"I can, for an instant, see him as he’d been all tall, kneeling down to me, saying, Don’t tell your mama and sister."

"And so begins what I see as his slow fade from me."

"How proud I feel shoving that giant globe of a belly through the subway turnstile."

"Joy is a different thing, because its focus exists outside the self—delight in something external, not satisfaction of some inner craving."

"Never have I felt such blazing focus for another living creature."

"My concept of commitment was to take all you could give."

"I imagine what my father would’ve done with me, then do the opposite."

"If I had a rubber bladder under my pillow... I could muster the strength to rear up and whack him vigorously about the head."

"My hand cups the duck-fuzzed head—such a strong pulse against my hand, faster than my own, but they syncopate somehow like tom-toms from far-off villages."

"I can’t be up all night and work all day, he says."

"I wasn’t entitled to any of that, of course, but the whiff of it lent me glancing courage."

"If a laser had sliced each of us cartoonlike down the middle—half of each falling away—we may not have noticed the missing half for days."

"Only in bed do we sometimes fall on each other like starved beasts."

"The only way I know to arrive at balance in my choices is through prayer."

"Affliction makes God appear to be absent for a time, more absent than a dead man, more absent than light in the utter darkness of a cell."

"The sun rises and sets. The moon makes two arcs over the house I fail to sleep in."

"You’re not bringing a problem to one person, you’re asking the group. The group is guided by principles that the individuals in it don’t embody solo."

"It’s no more nuts saying Just don’t drink today than saying I’ll quit tomorrow. Put your mind where your body is."

"The only time I connect with people is away from Warren. That can’t be good."

"The fact that you’ve continued to drink—given your history of depression and family trauma—borders on the moronic."

"Great, Tom says instead. You'll get sober, and your poems will get better, and your kid will grow up with a happy mother."

"God is the voice that says, 'I am not here.' —Don DeLillo, Falling Man"

"Progressive means, the young doctor goes on, whatever jackpot you just hit last night, whatever blackout, whatever bottom you found—that's where you go down from. That's your highlight. The top of the curve."

"Somebody who's crossed the line and craves liquor like you do and wants to keep drinking is like a pickle who wants to be a cucumber again. You can't. It's over."

"It's like you have cancer, she says, and coming here is really chemo. It's not a luxury. It's not a help. It's what stands between you and going insane or winding up in the boneyard."

"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."

"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. —Samuel Beckett"

"If God hasn't 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."

"Don't approach your history as something to be shaken for its cautionary fruit... Tell your stories, and your story will be revealed... Don't be afraid of appearing angry, small-minded, obtuse, mean, immoral, amoral, calculating, or anything else. Take no care for your dignity."

"Breathe deeply to calm yourself. Then count your breaths to ten, over and over."

"Please keep me away from a drink. I know I haven’t been really asking, but I really need it. Please please please."

"If you live in the dark a long time and the sun comes out, you do not cross into it whistling."

"If Dev hadn’t been sick so much, you’d have kept drinking…"

"We are all old timers. Each of us holds a locked razor."

"You’re not the only one on the ward, she says. People find creative ways to hurt themselves."

"I’ve also prayed to write as well as Wallace Stevens, prayed to be five-ten, and not had those prayers answered."

"If you don’t believe in God, you know there’s scientific evidence about the psychological benefits of meditation, even among nonbelievers."

"She’ll never let you go, she says, referring to my in-house shrink: Alice in Wonderland."

"It’s such a cliché to hate your shrink when you’re in the bin."

"I’m sleeping so well, I say. I think all our talks are paying off."

"The big problem when I came in was my head, I say."

"As part of my program to look like a model inmate, I organize something I call Health and Beauty Day."

"She runs back into the bathroom and slams the door."

"Everybody has to work out their own shit. Isn’t that what your meetings tell you?"

"Whenever you cut yourself, you’re carving your mother’s sick message into your flesh."

"The prayer’s automatic, and it comes like a burst of lightning."

"The prayer—which Jack of the Tinfoil Helmet first said that night going home from the meeting—now rivers through, sometimes dozens of times a day."

"Rather than thinking about spiritual practices, arguing them out in my head, I almost automatically try them."

"The writing has come back—with a polished quiet around it."

"You gotta love a date willing to do stuff he’ll regret."

"This must be what the people in meetings have been gushing about."

"But my memory for joy is still uncultivated."

"Because, I say, children are childish. You’re new to school, relatively. They’ve all grown up together. You’re the obvious choice."

"When you grow up, you’re gonna be so smart and good-looking that if something bad didn’t happen to you now, you’d be a jerk then—one of those snotty kids who thinks he’s all that."

"Dan knows karate. He only invited the cool kids to his birthday."