Mary Karr
Mary Karr
Mary Karris an American poet, essayist and memoirist. She rose to fame in 1995 with the publication of her bestselling memoir The Liars' Club. She is the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth16 January 1955
CountryUnited States of America
heart world dull
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.
falling-in-love writing thinking
I think we fall in love and become adults and become citizens in a way by writing stories about ourselves.
mother hurt grief
The Lesson You've Got to learn is the someday you'll someday stagger to, blinking in cold light, all tears shed, ready to poke your bovine head in the yoke they've shaped. Everyone learns this. Born, everyone breathes, pays tax, plants dead and hurts galore. There's grief enough for each. My mother learned by moving man to man, outlived them all. The parched earth's bare (once she leaves it) of any who watched the instants I trod it. Other than myself, of course. I've made a study of bearing and forbearance. Everyone does, it turns out, and note those faces passing by: Not one's a god.
lonely mail sometimes
I get so lonely sometimes, I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger.
zero heart space
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.
alternatives world needs
I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world.
too-much enough
For me, everything's too much and nothing's enough.
years overnight-success publishing
I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I'd been publishing for 20 years.
effort trying world
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.
doomed inconvenient
I'm doomed to act like myself, even when it's inconvenient!
thinking catholic looks
I don't think I look like the pope's favorite Catholic - at least not under close scrutiny.
coffee flower night
No road offers more mystery than that first one you mount from the town you were born to, the first time you mount it of your own volition, on a trip funded by your own coffee tin of wrinkled up dollars - bills you've saved and scrounged for, worked the all-night switchboard for, missed the Rolling Stones for, sold fragrant pot with smashed flowers going brown inside twist-tie plastic baggies for. In fact, to disembark from your origins, you've done everything you can think to scrounge money save selling your spanking young pussy.
blessed believe self
I believe in God, but even if you don't, you can believe in a self, the person who is innately who you are. Once you fully become that person, then everything you do will be blessed.
girl children yankees
Most great writers suffer and have no idea how good they are. Most bad writers are very confident. Be willing to be a child and be the Lilliputian in the world of Gulliver, the bat girl in Yankee Stadium. That’s a more fruitful way to be.