Quotes By Author: Mary Karr

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“What hurts so bad about youth isn’t the actual butt whippings the world delivers. It’s the stupid hopes playacting like certainties.”

“A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.”