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161 " 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 , The Liars' Club
162 " Most kids bent their heads onto their notebooks and tried to sleep. One boy gauged the quality of his day by sleeping on graph paper, then drawing a circle around the drool spot he’d made and comparing it for size and integrity to his drool spot from the day before. For "
163 " Then it hits me. I’m actually kneeling before a toilet. The throne, as other drunks call it. How many drunken nights and slungover mornings did I worship at this altar, emptying myself of poison. And yet to pray to something above me, something invisible, had—before now—seemed degrading. "
― Mary Karr , Lit
164 " It was a feminist act, revealing secrets in order to free herself and the women of her clan from the silence and obscurity to which a misogyny thousands of years old would have relegated them. "
― Mary Karr , The Art of Memoir
165 " nothing matters but the quality of the affection— in the end—that has carved the trace in the mind dove "
166 " There was a diet center that sported a plywood cutout of a pink pig wearing a brick-red polka-dot dress. The bubble coming from the pig’s mouth held this phrase: A New Way To Lose Weight Without Starving To Death. "
167 " . I was only precocious mentally and lived in deadly fear of losing my virtue, not for moral reasons, but from the dread of being thought “easy. "
168 " Leechfield Will Grease The Planet! "
169 " Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild, elsewise every raped baby would grow up to raped. "
170 " I ALMOST FELT A WEIRD POWER OVER MOTHER DURING SUCH TIME. SHE HAD A HOLD ON ME, AT LEAST. AND HER GRIP FELT LIKE SHE WOULD HANG ON NO MATTER WHAT I YANKED HER THROUGH. BY THIS TIME IT WAS HURRICANE SEASON. "
171 " sister was. But I couldn’t resist such a clear shot. So I said her "
172 " 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. "
173 " Her mother's injunction on competing with other girls is a challenge, a gauntlet thrown down: "You just have to be smarter than the ones who are prettier and prettier than the ones who are smarter "
― Mary Karr , Cherry
174 " Life is a field of corn. Literature is the shot glass it distills down into. Lorrie Moore "
175 " As novelist Harry Crews once wrote, I’m the kind of person who—if he can’t have too much of something—doesn’t want any of it. In "
176 " The difference between mad people and sane people,” Brave Orchid explained to the children, “is that sane people have variety when they talk story. Mad people have only one story that they talk over and over.” Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior "
177 " If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it. Zora Neale Hurston "
178 " In those days, I still enjoyed a child's desperate tendency to put sparkles on my whole tribe. "
― Mary Karr
179 " I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I'd been publishing for 20 years. "
180 " Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards. "