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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 712116d | 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 | ||
| ceda55e | Unless you're like my friend, poet Brooks Haxton (who translates Greek, Latin, French, Hebrew, and German), throwing in three-dollar words will just make you look like a dick. | Mary Karr | ||
| 639670f | His silence hadn't been helplessness--it hadn't even been love. It had been pity. | Mary Karr | ||
| 7ecf810 | You can be a slave to current magazines or a slave to history | Mary Karr | ||
| 8f90806 | I jerked huffing in air to holler, but the scream got stuck, just added itself onto the large round scream that all my life had been assembling in my chest. | Mary Karr | ||
| a3cdfd2 | To my mind, a small bit of catshit equals a catshit sandwich, unless I know where the catshit is and can eat around it. | Mary Karr | ||
| 6257f48 | Effortless, excellence has to be. Tossed off, reflecting the ease you're born to, which opposes what little I've garnered about comportment. 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 | ||
| acad1f3 | It takes an obsessive streak that borders on lunacy to go rummaging around in the past as memoirists are wont to do, particularly a fragmented or incendiary past, in which facts are sparse and stories don't match up. I don't know if memoirists as children are lied to more often as kids or only grow up to resent it more, but it does seem we often come from the ranks of orphans or half-orphans-through-divorce, trying to heal schisms inside ou.. | Mary Karr | ||
| 042391d | When the truth would be unbearable the mind often just blanks it out. But some ghost of an event may stay in your head. Then, like the smudge of a bad word quickly wiped off a school blackboard, this ghost can call undue attention to itself by its very vagueness. You keep studying the dim shape of it, as if the original form will magically emerge. This blank spot in my past, then, spoke most loudly to me by being blank. It was a hole in my .. | Mary Karr | ||
| e6f8d11 | It's hard to be an articulate ghost. | memoirs | Mary Karr | |
| 5b918c6 | 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 | ||
| 8843560 | Maybe it fostered in me a creeping ambition-deficit disorder, but it could ease an ache. So anything worth doing could be undertaken later. Paint the apartment, write a book, quit booze, sure: tomorrow. Which | Mary Karr | ||
| 607cb62 | Which ensures that life gets lived in miniature. In lieu of the large feelings--sorrow, fury, joy--I had their junior counterparts--anxiety, irritation, excitement. But | Mary Karr | ||
| 8d6e558 | Height - ours and our boyfriends - is a running contest between Lecia and me. If I tell her good news about myself, she's liable to say 'I'm five-nine' and hang up. | Mary Karr | ||
| 73f0af3 | But because of you, I couldn't die and couldn't monster myself, either. So you were the agent of my rescue--not a good job for somebody barely three feet tall. Blameless | Mary Karr | ||
| 4ae3a3a | Every reporter who came up in legacy media can tell you about a come-to-Jesus moment when an editor put them up against a wall and tattooed a message deep into their skull: show respect for the fundamentals of the craft, or you would not soon be part of it. | Mary Karr | ||
| aacde69 | Asking me how to write a memoir is a little like saying, "I really want to have sex, where do I start?" What one person fantasizes about would ruin the romance for another." | Mary Karr | ||
| 33be934 | The week the local paper carried a story about the boy's incarceration and lobotomy in the state hospital at Rusk, the guys at the refinery pitched the kid's daddy a party complete with balloons and noisemakers. | Mary Karr | ||
| 62ff8eb | We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory. Louise Gluck, "Nostos" | Mary Karr | ||
| a359a7a | The creature you find in Speak, Memory is rare enough to be zoo-worthy. He's not just smarter but somehow more effete than most of us without seeming put on. Resenting him for it would be like resenting a gazelle for her grace. He doesn't sound prissy painting himself as a cultivated synesthete who can hear colors and see music, nor vain talking as a polyglot who translates his own work back and forth into many languages. He's just your sta.. | Mary Karr | ||
| d2c6e1e | I've said it's hard. Here's how hard: everybody I know who wades deep enough into memory's waters drowns a little. Between chapters of Stop-Time, Frank Conroy stayed drunk for weeks. Two hours after Carolyn See finished her first draft of Dreaming, she collapsed with viral meningitis, which gave her double vision: "It was my brain's way of saying, 'You've been looking where you shouldn't be looking.'" Martin Amis reported a suffocating ener.. | Mary Karr | ||
| 88da0b3 | They feed us the way the bread of communion does, with a nourishment that seems to form new flesh. According | Mary Karr | ||
| 6547782 | sentimentality is only emotion you haven't proven to the reader--emotion without vivid evidence. | Mary Karr | ||
| a003f19 | Why is it that everybody else is traffic? | Mary Karr | ||
| 9309d8e | Novels have intricate plots, verse has musical forms, history and biography enjoy the sheen of objective truth. In memoir, one event follows another. Birth leads to puberty leads to sex. The books are held together by happenstance, theme, and (most powerfully) the sheer, convincing poetry of a single person trying to make sense of the past. | Mary Karr | ||
| 8b1c71e | Metaphorically speaking, I always make room for any evidence of scurvy in my characters, any mitigating ailments. | Mary Karr | ||
| 71760e0 | Still, a living, breathing human being--even a boneheaded or barely articulate one--conveys so much in person. The physical fact of a creature with heart thrumming and neurons flickering--what Shakespeare called the 'poor, bare, forked animal'--compels us all; we're all hardwired in moments of empathy to see ourselves in another. | Mary Karr | ||
| 868d6ff | He knew he could worm his way beneath her defenses--he'd read every word of those diaries. He knew the one absolute way to fulfill her every dream. The problem was, could he do that to her? He didn't have to. He could turn about this moment and ride away. Yet that would mean leaving her forever. | regency-romance royal-four sexy-book spy | Celeste Bradley | |
| 85732be | My opponents' first argument was that the rocks of the earth--which are generally agreed to have once been in a hot and melted state--would have required far longer to lose their heat than the Scriptures described. My reply was that the earth had indeed cooled at great speed, being made possible by a process I termed Divine Refrigeration. | Matthew Kneale | ||
| c78df92 | From the Author Matthew 16:25 says, "For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it." This is a perfect picture of the life of Nate Saint; he gave up his life so God could reveal a greater glory in him and through him. I first heard the story of Operation Auca when I was eight years old, and ever since then I have been inspired by Nate's commitment to the cause of Christ. He was deter.. | Nancy Drummond | ||
| 75fb4d0 | If the Lowland farmer spoke with an uncouth accent, dressed in rags, lived in a miserable hovel, and fed on the same grain he fed his animals, it was not because he was a savage but because the relentless marauding of the English left him with very little choice. As for why he didn't simply cut his throat, the answer is that he was a Presbyterian and did not expect much in the way of earthly happiness. | farmers | William Maxwell | |
| d71b6d4 | Ono sto mi, ili barem ja, samouvjereno smatramo sjecanjem - znaci, trenutak, prizor, cinjenicu koja je fiksirana i tako spasena od zaborava - ustvari je oblik pripovijedanja koje se trajno odvija u umu i cesto s kazivanjem mijenja. Ukljuceno je previse proturjecnih emocionalnih interesa da bi zivot ikada bio potpuno prihvatljiv, i mozda je pripovjedaceva zadaca preurediti stvari tako da se prilagode tom cilju. U svakom slucaju, govoreci o p.. | William Maxwell | ||
| 4a9aa04 | For most people, having company for more than three of four days is a serious mistake, the equivalent to sawing a large hole in the roof and leaving all the doors and windows open in the middle of winter. Out of a desire to be helpful or the need to be kind, they let themselves in for prolonged spells of entertaining, forfeit their privacy and their easy understanding, knowing that the result will be an estrangement--however temporary--betw.. | William Maxwell | ||
| 2406323 | A little remembering is all right but too much is a disease I am terribly prone to. | Suzanne Marrs | ||
| 5e7b767 | Moralistic culture views government as a positive force, one that values the individual but functions to the benefit of the general public. Discussion of public issues and voting are not only rights but also opportunities to better the individual and society alike. Furthermore, politicians should not profit from their public service. | politics politics-of-the-united-states | William Earl Maxwell | |
| 98991c1 | human thought is by no means as private as it seems, and all that you need to read somebody else's mind is the willingness to read your own. | french human-thought | William Maxwell | |
| 3d95ba4 | It is impossible to say why people put so little value on complete happiness. | value | William Maxwell | |
| d263adf | When she gets into bed and the springs creak under her weight, she groans with the pleasure of lying stretched out on an object that understands her so well. | William Maxwell | ||
| 2bb69f0 | But to live in the world at all is to be committed to some kind of a journey... On a turning earth, in a mechanically revolving universe, there is no place to stand still. Neither the destination nor the point of departure are important. People often find themselves midway on a journey they had no intention of taking and that began they are not exactly sure where. | journey | William Maxwell | |
| 4b2bdfc | And there was nothing left for me to do, but go. Though the things of the world were strong with me still. Such as, for example: a gaggle of children trudging through a side-blown December flurry; a friendly match-share beneath some collision-tilted streetlight; a frozen clock, bird-visited within its high tower; cold water from a tin jug; toweling off one's clinging shirt post-June rain. Pearls, rags, buttons, rug-tuft, beer-froth. Someone.. | George Saunders | ||
| 47d9942 | Lightning strikes the slaughterhouse flagpole and the antelope scatter like minnows as the rain begins to fall, and finally, having lost what was to be lost, my torn and black heart rebels, saying enough already, enough, this is as low as I go. | George Saunders | ||
| 5a39295 | Note to future generations: In our time, are such things as credit cards. Company loans money, you pay back at high interest rate. Is nice for when you do not actually have money to do thing you want to do (for example, buy extravagant cheetah). You may say, safe in your future time: Wouldn't it be better to simply not do things you can't afford to do? Easy for you to say. | George Saunders | ||
| 5a451d5 | Why will it not work. What magic word made it work. Who is the keeper of that word. What did it profit Him to switch this one off. What a contraption it is. How did it ever run. What spark ran it. Grand little machine. Set up just so. Receiving the spark, it jumped to life. | George Saunders | ||
| 027e855 | All men labor under some impingements on their freedom; none is absolutely at liberty. | George Saunders |