“A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.”
― Mary Karr, quote from The Liars' Club
“Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild...”
― Mary Karr, quote from The Liars' Club
“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, quote from The Liars' Club
“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, quote from The Liars' Club
“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”
― Mary Karr, quote from The Liars' Club
“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, quote from The Liars' Club
“Daddy said a Republican was somebody who couldn’t enjoy eating unless he knew somebody else was hungry,”
― Mary Karr, quote from The Liars' Club
“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.”
― Mary Karr, quote from The Liars' Club
“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 deserve. Pool got shot not as metaphor for some corporate battle, but as itself alone. And the spiritual comforts-friendship, for instance—couldn’t be confused with payback for something you’d accomplished, for in the Legion everybody punched the same clock, drew the same wage, won the same prize.”
― Mary Karr, quote from The Liars' Club
“A pool game mixes ritual with geometry.”
― Mary Karr, quote from The Liars' Club
“The first night he slept with her, he took a washrag and a jug of wood alcohol to get rid of her makeup, saying he wanted to know what he was getting into.”
― Mary Karr, quote from The Liars' Club
“I couldn't have been more than six, but I was calling her an ignorant little bitch. Her momma stood on the porch step shaking her mop at me and saying there were snakes and lizards coming out of my mouth, to which I said i didn't give a shit.”
― Mary Karr, quote from The Liars' Club
“He was so proud that she had more going on north of her neck than her hairdo.”
― Mary Karr, quote from The Liars' Club
“After Mother got her picture, we all stood around the fire truck eating moon-shaped cookies dusted with powdered sugar that the mayor's wife had brought in some Tupperware. It was stuff like that that'd break your heart about Leechfield, what Daddy meant when he said the town was too ugly not to love.”
― Mary Karr, quote from The Liars' Club
“Before that summer, I had many times heard long-winded Baptist preachers take ten minutes to pray over card tables of potato salad and fried chicken at church picnics, but the way those sweating, red-faced men sat around on stacked pallets of lumber gulping oysters taught me most of what I knew about simple gladness.”
― Mary Karr, quote from The Liars' Club
“The fact that my house was Not Right metastasized into the notion that I myself was somehow Not Right, or that my survival in the world depended on my constant vigilance against various forms of Not-Rightness.”
― Mary Karr, quote from The Liars' Club
“I think about the story of Job I heard in Carol Sharp's Sunday school. How he sort of learned to lean into feeling hurt at the end, the way you might lean into a heavy wind that almost winds up supporting you after a while.”
― Mary Karr, quote from The Liars' Club
“I lock all my scaredness down in my stomach until the fear hardens into something I hardly notice. I myself harden into a person that I hardly notice.”
― Mary Karr, quote from The Liars' Club
“The image pleases me enough : to slip from the body's tight container and into some luminous womb, gliding there without effort till the distant shapes glow brighter and more familiar, till all your beloveds hover before you, their lit arms held out in welcome.”
― Mary Karr, quote from The Liars' Club
“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, quote from The Liars' Club
“A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. —Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian”
― Mary Karr, quote from The Liars' Club
“They feed us the way the bread of communion does, with a nourishment that seems to form new flesh. According”
― Mary Karr, quote from The Liars' Club
“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 life that I both feared and kept coming back to because I couldn’t quite fill it in.”
― Mary Karr, quote from The Liars' Club
“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, quote from The Liars' Club
“A hawk reeled overhead with a rodent squirming in its beak, close enough so you could see the bird’s black shiny eyes.”
― Mary Karr, quote from The Liars' Club
“(Later, I'l learn that's the structure of an elegy: lament, consolation; bad news, followed by good news.)”
― Mary Karr, quote from The Liars' Club
“She holds every dress briefly by its shoulders like it’s a schoolkid she’s checking out for smudges before church. Then one by one they get flung away from her and into the fire.”
― Mary Karr, quote from The Liars' Club
“The cans of bathroom cleaner they sold had faced the sun in their display pyramid for so long that their front labels had faded from lime green to pale lemon. The mouse-print instructions about not eating the stuff could no longer be read. “If swallowed—” each of the cans said, then there was just a wordless scorch mark as warning. At”
― Mary Karr, quote from The Liars' Club
“her parents roared around in the masks of monsters. Not”
― Mary Karr, quote from The Liars' Club
“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, quote from The Liars' Club
Mary Karr
Born place: in Groves, Texas, The United States
Born date January 16, 1955
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“I realized I needed to look at evil in an entirely new light. Most bad guys weren’t running around with eyes bugged out. Most bad guys didn’t come across freaky and frightening…Most bad guys were normal, everyday guys moving through life like anyone else… They were hard to spot and that’s what made them so good at being bad… They could get away with it, and they knew it.”
― S. Walden, quote from Going Under
“Men were such strange creatures. Perhaps getting shot at and defending a woman against wild animals and evil archers truly was his idea of enjoyment.”
― Melanie Dickerson, quote from The Fairest Beauty
“Shred my beard and call me Ishmael!” the captain shouted. He”
― Lisa McMann, quote from Island of Fire
“What makes a human being want to kill another who has done him no personal harm? Patriotism.”
― Theresa Breslin, quote from Remembrance
“Is anyone human actually normal? I'm beginning to think being normal is actually abnormal.”
― Simone Elkeles, quote from How to Ruin Your Boyfriend's Reputation
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