Quotes From "The Liars Club" By Mary Karr

I liked to call myself a poet and had affected a habit of reading classical texts (in translation, of course — I was a lazy student). I would ride the Greyhound for thirty-six hours down from the Midwest to Leechfield, then spend days dressed in black in the scalding heat of my mother’s front porch reading Homer (or Ovid or Virgil) and waiting for someone to ask me what I was reading. No one ever did. People asked me what I was drinking, how much I weighed, where I was living, and if I had married yet, but no one gave me a chance to deliver my lecture on Great Literature. . Mary Karr

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

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

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

Just being out of the house with Daddy like this at Fisher's lights me up enough for somebody to read by me. Mary Karr