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3070933
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A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.
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humor
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Mary Karr |
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bd5b93f
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What hurts so bad about youth isn't the actual butt whippings the world delivers. It's the stupid hopes playacting like certainties.
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youth
hope
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Mary Karr |
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2f54918
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Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild...
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karr
liars
mary
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Mary Karr |
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4bd11c2
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If you live in the dark a long time and the sun comes out, you do not cross into it whistling. There's an initial uprush of relief at first, then-for me, anyway- a profound dislocation. My old assumptions about how the world works are buried, yet my new ones aren't yet operational.There's been a death of sorts, but without a few days in hell, no resurrection is possible.
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rebirth
resurrection
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Mary Karr |
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6e650f2
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Ten years, she's dead, and I still find myself some mornings reaching for the phone to call her. She could no more be gone than gravity or the moon.
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grief
loss
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Mary Karr |
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035ab57
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For me, everything's too much and nothing's enough.
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Mary Karr |
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a3c87e1
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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.
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Mary Karr |
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18a7781
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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.
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Mary Karr |
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3435a64
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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.
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Mary Karr |
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6feb433
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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.
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Mary Karr |
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e9d49fd
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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 surv..
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Mary Karr |
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9db86ad
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The shreiking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.
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Mary Karr |
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d998b68
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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.
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poetry
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Mary Karr |
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826d7ea
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I'd spent way more years worrying about how to look like a poet -- buying black clothes, smearing on scarlet lipstick, languidly draping myself over thrift-store furniture -- than I had learning how to assemble words in some discernible order.
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poets
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Mary Karr |
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8fe4c90
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Writing, regardless of the end result--whether good or bad, published or not, well reviewed or slammed--means celebrating beauty in an often ugly world.
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Mary Karr |
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46bfc54
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Faith is a choice like any other. If you're picking a career or a husband - or deciding whether to have a baby - there are feelings and reasons pro and con out the wazoo. But thinking it through is - at the final hour - horse dookey. You can only try out.
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Mary Karr |
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70c2801
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I loved the idea that looking at a painting or listening to a concerto could make you somehow "transcend" the day-in, day-out bullshit that grinds you down: how in one instant of pure attention you could draw something inside that made you forever larger"
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Mary Karr |
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6f0f6a3
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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.
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Mary Karr |
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db5de96
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Daddy said a Republican was somebody who couldn't enjoy eating unless he knew somebody else was hungry,
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Mary Karr |
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3e173fe
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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, yo..
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Mary Karr |
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43154d7
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Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life.
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Mary Karr |
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9ea8e9d
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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.
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Mary Karr |
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9598802
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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.
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graduation
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Mary Karr |
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c1dda7e
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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. Ot..
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Mary Karr |
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cad9122
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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.
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work
life
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Mary Karr |
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6434852
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In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said.
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Mary Karr |
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3ecfdda
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How much smaller the large places are once we're grown up, when we have car keys and credit cards.
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Mary Karr |
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6eb465e
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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.
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Mary Karr |
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2621751
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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 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.
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Mary Karr |
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784036a
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Bad things are gonna' happen to you, because they happen to us all. And worrying won't stave the really bad things off. Don't make the mistake of comparing your twisted-up insides to other people's blow-dried outsides. Even the most privileged person in this stadium suffers the torments of the damned just going about the business of being human.
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graduation
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Mary Karr |
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0dce06b
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We're not made to wallow in pleasure. Pleasure is joy's assassin.
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memoirs
memoir
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Mary Karr |
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97804d3
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And Meredith says that reminds her of a Camus novel, the one about the plague, and she tells the story of it, the tale holding you in thrall, and she ends her version with a line you'll write down in your notebook, the place where the atheist doctor hollers at a priest: All your certainties aren't worth one strand of a woman's hair.
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Mary Karr |
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5261c80
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The changes are coming fast and blind now, and in your skull sits an hourglass with a grain size hole through which numb seconds are sliding.
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Mary Karr |
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58fea70
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I've said it's hard. Here's how hard: everybody I know who wades deep enough into memory's waters drowns a little.
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Mary Karr |
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5854766
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I get so lonely sometimes, I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger.
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Mary Karr |
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6c5f333
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At some point the talk got heated, and Paolo called Mother a strumpet, for which Daddy was said to have stomped a serious mudhole in Paolo's ass.
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Mary Karr |
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d9d35f4
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Dumb hope is what it hurts most to write, occupying the foolish schemes we pursued for decades, the blind alleys, the cliffs we stepped off.
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Mary Karr |
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5331cce
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He never gave up on me, I only stopped being matriculated.
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Mary Karr |
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acafd65
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That bar also delineated the realm of sweat and hourly wage, the working world that college was educating me to leave. Rewards in that realm were few. No one congratulated you for clocking out. Your salary was spare. The Legion served as recompense. So the physical comforts you bouth there--hot boudain sausage and cold beer--had value. You attended the place, by which I mean you not only went there but gave it attention your job didn't dese..
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Mary Karr |
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c115231
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Born on third base, my daddy always said of the well off, and they think they hit a home run.
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Mary Karr |
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8679e8e
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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 ..
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Mary Karr |
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8e5cab3
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A pool game mixes ritual with geometry.
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Mary Karr |
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0fc007c
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Your mother rolls her eyes at the cat lapping grapefruit juice, says, "Everything that comes into this house is crazy - whether we choose them for that or they get that way, I don't know."
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Mary Karr |
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704aabd
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None of us can ever know the value of our lives, or how our separate and silent scribbling may add to the amenity of the world, if only by how radically it changes us, one and by one.
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Mary Karr |