When I got sober, I thought giving up was saying goodbye to all the fun and all the sparkle, and it turned out to be just the opposite. That's when the sparkle started for me. Mary Karr More Quotes by Mary Karr More Quotes From Mary Karr I'm doomed to act like myself, even when it's inconvenient! Mary Karr inconvenient doomed 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. Mary Karr coffee flower night 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 effort trying world 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. Mary Karr yankee-stadium girl children I don't think I look like the pope's favorite Catholic - at least not under close scrutiny. Mary Karr catholic looks thinking For me, everything's too much and nothing's enough. Mary Karr too-much enough A pool game mixes ritual with geometry. Mary Karr geometry pool games Memoir is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt. Mary Karr memoir literature memories There are women succeeding beyond their wildest dreams because of their sobriety. Mary Karr sobriety dream inspirational Love is the only passion which includes in its dreams the happiness of someone else. Mary Karr dream witty love 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. Mary Karr smart students school I think we fall in love and become adults and become citizens in a way by writing stories about ourselves. Mary Karr falling-in-love writing thinking The failures of other genres to provide an emotional connection with some of their characters and narratives gives memoir a toehold. Mary Karr emotional giving character 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 voice listening thinking 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. Mary Karr suffering stuff people 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 heart dull world People who didn't live pre-Internet can't grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. I stopped in the middle of the SAT to memorize a poem, because I thought, This is a great work of art and I'll never see it again. Mary Karr people ideas art I kept the fingers of my left hand crossed all the time, while on my right-hand fingers I counted anything at all—steps to the refrigerator, seconds on the clock, words in a sentence—to keep my head occupied. The counting felt like something to hang on to, as if finding the right numbers might somehow crack the code on whatever system ran the slippery universe we were moving through. Mary Karr numbers hands moving I get so lonely sometimes, I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger. Mary Karr mail lonely sometimes 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. Mary Karr grief hurt mother
