Kursten Karr Quotes

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. ~ Mary Karr

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

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. ~ Mary Karr

Sometimes I wish I could just be like everyone else my age and not think at all. ~ Julia Karr

His hold is tight, our fingers are laced, and he's occasionally rubbing circles on the top of my hand with his thumb. These small gestures definitely make handholding seem more like an art. ~ Kim Karr

Unless you're a doubter and a worrier, a nail-biter, an apologizer, a rethinker, then memoir may not be your playpen. That's the quality I've found most consistently in those life-story writers I've met. ~ Mary Karr

Could love at first sight be real? ~ Kim Karr

The first day of school, we walked till we reached a stretch of black graffiti on the sidewalk. Somebody named Ken blew dead bears, it said. ~ Mary Karr

You're back and forth with me, with your actions, with your emotions. You act like you don't remember me, then spring on me that you do. You flirt with me and then you stop on a dime. You kiss me and then you pull away as soon as I touch you. You're mad then you're not." I don't stop to take a breath or let him speak before finally raising the hand he's holding and letting it go. "You're holding my hand, then . . ." I trail off, not sure of how to finish that thought. Tearing my gaze from his, I try to rein in my emotions, to wipe the flustered girl up off the floor. ~ Kim Karr

That line between love and lust was thin as a whisper. ~ Julia Karr

All people have three characters, that which they exhibit, that which they are, and that which they think they are. ~ Alphonse Karr

We both trust each other because, after all, isn't that what love is – knowing someone can crush you, but believing they never will, trusting them not to? ~ Kim Karr

Let us try to see things from their better side: You complain about seeing thorny rose bushes; Me, I rejoice and give thanks to the gods That thorns have roses. ~ Alphonse Karr

Having devoted the first half of my life to the dark, I feel obliged to rever any pinpoint of light now. ~ Mary Karr

Aye, we all know your fondness for apples, brother. ~ Phyllis Ann Karr

You are loved, someone said. Take that and eat it. ~ Mary Karr

Nothing matters but the quality of the affection - in the end - that has carved the trace in the mind dove ~ Mary Karr

And you snap out of it. Or are snapped out of it. Never again will you lay a hand against yourself, not as long as there are plums to eat and somebody
anybody
who gives enough of a damn to haul them to you. So long as you bear the least nibblet of love for any other creature in this dark world, though in love portions are never stingy. There are no smidgens on pinches, only rolling abundance. That's how you acquire the resolution for survival that the upcoming years are about to demand. You don't give it. You earn it. ~ Mary Karr

Those are only rumors of suffering. Real suffering has a face and a smell. It lasts in the most intense form no matter what you drape over it. And it knows your name. ~ Mary Karr

What would you write if you weren't afraid? ~ Mary Karr

Happiness is composed of misfortunes avoided. ~ Alphonse Karr

Religion seemed to me like one group of people telling another group that their color of red was the best. And that everyone had to believe that, or else. ~ Julia Karr

I feel my body start to tremble, overflowing with the amount of love I feel for this girl. She's had so much sadness in her life. As I gently pick her up and carry her to the bed, I feel so lucky that I'm the one who gets to give her her happy ever after. ~ Kim Karr

During my short college stint, every time I picked up a pen, this grinding, unnamed fear overcame me - later identified as fear that my real self would spill out. One can't mount a stripper pole wearing a metal diving suit. What I needed to write kept simmering up while I wrote down everything but that. In fact, I kept ginning out reasons that writing reality was impossible. I cranked up therapy and drank like a fish. ~ Mary Karr

I'm not nearly smart enough or imaginative enough to tackle the novel form. Never happen. ~ Mary Karr

I revise and revise and revise. Any editor of mine will tell you how crappy my early drafts are. Revisions are about clarifying and evoking feelings in the reader in the same way they were once evoked in me. ~ Mary Karr

The trick in that town was getting through a night at all without stalling in the sludge of your own thoughts. ~ Mary Karr

After a lifetime of hounding authors for advice, I've heard three truths from every mouth: (1) Writing is painful
it's 'fun' only for novices, the very young, and hacks; (2) other than a few instances of luck, good work only comes through revision; (3) the best revisers often have reading habits that stretch back before the current age, which lends them a sense of history and raises their standards for quality. ~ Mary Karr

It strikes me that whatever advantages there are to being a boy
getting to stay out late and having other people wash your clothes and bring you plates of stuff
get undercut by having to play football. ~ Mary Karr

If women only knew the extent of their power! ~ Alphonse Karr

The American religion-so far as there is one anymore-seems to be doubt. Whoever believes the least wins, because he'll never be found wrong. ~ Mary Karr

Friendship between two women is always a plot against another one. ~ Alphonse Karr

A woman who writes commits two sins; she increases the number of books, and decreases the number of women. ~ Alphonse Karr

If your goal is to polish up a fake person you can sell to a public you perceive as dumb, the unexamined life will do perfectly well, thank you. ~ Mary Karr

It sometimes seems to me like we're not supposed to notice that Shug's colored, or that saying anything about it would be bad manners. That puzzles me because Shug's being colored strikes me as real obvious. And usually anybody's difference gets pounced on and picked at. This silence is a lie peculiar to a man's skin color, which makes it extra serious and extra puzzling. Daddy ~ Mary Karr

At the Sound of the Gunshot,
Leave A Message

That's what my friend spoke
into his grim machine the winter he first went mad
as we both did in our thirties with still
no hope of revenue, gravely inking
our poems on pages held fast by gyres
the color of lead.

Godless, our minds
did monster us, left us bobbing as in a swamp
until we sank. His eyes were burn holes
in a swollen face. His breath was a venom
he drank deep of. He called his own tongue
a scar, this poet

who can crowbar open
the most sealed heart, make ash flower,
and the cocked shotgun's double-zero mouths
(whose pellets had exploded star holes into plaster and porcelain
and not a few locked doors) never touched
my friend's throat. Praise

Him, whose earth is green.

(for Franz Wright) ~ Mary Karr

I'm doomed to act like myself, even when it's inconvenient! ~ Mary Karr

You were my once in a lifetime.
This I knew from the moment your eyes met mine.
You were my once in a lifetime.
This I knew the first time I whispered into your ear and my heart stopped.
You were my once in a lifetime.
This I knew when your face touched my spirit.
You were my once in a lifetime.
This I knew when I kissed your lips and felt it in my soul.
So where did you go, where did you go? ~ Kim Karr

Life is a field of corn. Literature is the shot glass it distills down into. Lorrie Moore ~ Mary Karr

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

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

Charm is from the Latin carmen: to sing. By "charm," I mean sing well enough to hold the reader in thrall. Whatever people like about you in the world will manifest itself on the page. What drives them crazy will keep you humble. You'll need both sides of yourself - the beautiful and the beastly - to hold a reader's attention. ~ Mary Karr

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. I lace my fingers with his. The average non-poetry devotee may think the intensity around this stuff off-kilter at the least, but for us, it's like digging our hands together into a secret vat of pearls. In that realm only we are rich as any royalty. ~ Mary Karr

(Later, I'l learn that's the structure of an elegy: lament, consolation; bad news, followed by good news.) ~ Mary Karr