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Lit QUOTES

Lit QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " 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. "

― Mary Karr , Lit

3 " 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. "

― Mary Karr , Lit

4 " 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. "

― Mary Karr , Lit

5 " 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 , Lit

6 " 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. "

― Mary Karr , Lit

7 " If you'd told me even a year before...that I'd wind up whispering my sins in the confessional or on my knees saying the rosary, I would've laughed myself cockeyed. More likely pastime?Pole dancer. International spy. Drug mule. Assassin.

I drive under a sky black as graphite to meet my new spiritual director...a bulky Franciscan nun named Sister Margaret, patiently going blind behind fish-tank glasses that magnify her eyes like goggles. "

― Mary Karr , Lit

8 " . . . for a good story, told often enough puts you in rooms you've never occupied. "

― Mary Karr , Lit

9 " We're not made to wallow in pleasure. Pleasure is joy's assassin. "

― Mary Karr , Lit

10 " The head can travel a far piece while the body sits in one spot. It can traverse many decades, and many conversations can be had, even with the dead. "

― Mary Karr , Lit

11 " Joy, it is, which I’ve never known before, only pleasure or excitement. Joy is a different thing, because its focus exists outside the self – delight in something external, not satisfaction of some inner craving. "

― Mary Karr , Lit

12 " Tomorrow! How sweet its prospects for a drunkard the night before. There is no better word. Before the earth hurls itself into sunshine, nothing is not possible. "

― Mary Karr , Lit

13 " It's hard to be an articulate ghost. "

― Mary Karr , Lit

14 " Slurping these spirits is soul preparation, a warped communion, myself serving as god, priest, and congregation. "

― Mary Karr , Lit

15 " Standing in the shower, I feel something on the back of my leg that turns out to be my ass. "

― Mary Karr , Lit

16 " For me, everything's too much and nothing's enough. "

― Mary Karr , Lit

17 " 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. "

― Mary Karr , Lit

18 " 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. "

― Mary Karr , Lit

19 " 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. "

― Mary Karr , Lit

20 " The shreiking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water. "

― Mary Karr , Lit