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141 " Metaphorically speaking, I always make room for any evidence of scurvy in my characters, any mitigating ailments. "
― Mary Karr , The Art of Memoir
142 " 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. "
143 " The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop. Mark Twain The "
144 " The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Mark Twain Every "
145 " (What hurts so bad about youth isn’t the actual butt whippings the world delivers. It’s the stupid hopes playacting like certainties.) "
― Mary Karr , Lit
146 " Students love trying to imitate Nabokov, which teaches them a lot—mostly about why not to imitate somebody wired so differently from yourself. Nabokov wannabes don’t sound just like turds, but like pretentious turds. The writer’s best voice will grow from embracing her own “you-ness”—which I call talent, and which is best expressed in voice. Which "
147 " 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 , The Liars' Club
148 " I put just a teaspoon of catshit in your sandwich, but you didn’t notice it at all.” To my mind, a small bit of catshit equals a catshit sandwich, unless I know where the catshit is and can eat around it. "
149 " (Later, I'l learn that's the structure of an elegy: lament, consolation; bad news, followed by good news.) "
150 " 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. "
151 " The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Mark Twain "
152 " I believe that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of [man’s] puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. William Faulkner "
153 " Then the game became guessing where the storm would hit, or, in local parlance, “go in,” as if it were some stray relative in search of lodging. "
154 " (“No man but a blockhead ever wrote for any cause but money,” Samuel Johnson said.) "
155 " was behind in every conceivable way. So the old attack dog started howling through my head as I’d "
156 " 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 "
157 " No writer can impose his own standards onto any other, nor claim to speak for the whole genre. "
158 " whether you’re a memoirist or not, there’s a psychic cost for lopping yourself off from the past: "
159 " 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 "
160 " her parents roared around in the masks of monsters. Not "