Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" I was a philosophy major as an undergraduate, and I'm just an arrogant little thing. It's hard for me to admit that I can't understand something, let alone not be in charge of it. "

Mary Karr

Admit

Understand

Alone

Related Quotes:

" There are all kinds of things God wants me to do that I'm very obstreperous about. "

" I have a completely addictive personality. Diet Coke is my last - God, I know people counting days off Diet Coke; I'm such a Diet Cokehead. Now I won't let myself buy it. "

" I get about five memoirs per week in my mailbox, and few of them inspire anything but a desire to pick up the channel changer. "

Mary Karr

Anything

Week

" Writing about prayer to a secular audience is tap-dancing on the radio. I want to say, 'Gee whiz, isn't this great,' and have everyone's head cocked like the RCA dog. "

" Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it. "

" Nobody sounds good writing about your divorce, let's face it. "

" The thing I have to do as a writer, and that God permits me to do, is that I have to be willing to fail. "

" I find a great deal of comfort and care in my faith and prayer. I'd sooner do without air than prayer. "

" I'm doomed to act like myself, even when it's inconvenient! "

Mary Karr

Even

Myself

" Both my parents were agnostic. My mother was kind of a Buddhist. She had some spiritual tendencies, but they were kind of flaky - New Agey, you know? Which is partly why I'm suspicious of that sort of thing. I'm skeptical of any spiritual practice that doesn't involve other people and doesn't involve some sort of consistent tradition. "

" I don't have a copy of my books, and the degree to which I never read them is profound. I never look. "

" I'm always astonished by the confidence my readers put in me. "

Mary Karr

Always

Astonished

" Age about 30, I stopped looking up my books in bookstores. Paying attention to the marketplace isn't a healthy thing for me. "

Mary Karr

Attention

Looking

" For days on end, I avoid the Web, never logging in until about two or three, after I've written all morning. On a good week, I don't go online till after Wednesday, so four or five days might lapse without my checking e-mail. "

" I always thought my family was so bizarre, so when people started coming up to me and saying, 'My family was exactly like yours,' I was completely knocked out. "

Mary Karr

Family

Thought

" I think being tortured as a virtue is a kind of antiquated sense of what it is to be an artist. It comes out of that Symbolist idea, back to Rimbaud and all that disordering of the senses and all of that being some exalted state. When I've been that way, I've always been less exalted than I would have liked. "

" Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else's suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take communion, you make a community with others. "

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

" Young writers often mistakenly choose a certain vein or style based on who they want to be, unconsciously trying to blot out who they actually are. You want to escape yourself. "

" People who didn't live pre-Internet can't grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. The only bookstores sold Bibles the size of coffee tables and dashboard Virgin Marys that glowed in the dark. "

" I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I'd been publishing for 20 years. "

" The audiobooks I buy are never first-time reads - only rereadings of books I know well that I find intoxicating. "

" Childhood was terrifying for me. A kid has no control. You're three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, and illiterate. Terror snaps you awake. You pay keen attention. People can just pick you up and move you and put you down. "

" It's completely through prayer that I came to believe in God. I just sensed a presence south of my neck. "

" The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold. "

" When people suffer, their relationships usually suffer as well. Period. And we all suffer because, as the Buddha says, that's the nature of being human and wanting stuff we don't always get. "

" Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time. "

" The truth is when I went to graduate school I would've said I was among the least talented of the students, I was certainly the least smart, or less educated. But I worked very hard. "

" I do have a really good memory. I mean, like, I can remember all the phone numbers of everybody on the street I grew up on. "

" Having a great dad probably permitted me to pal around with guys in a way that some women don't. "