Mary Karr: Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild...

A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.
― Mary Karr, The Liars' Club

Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild...
― Mary Karr, The Liars' Club

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.
― Mary Karr, The Liars' Club

Daddy said a Republican was somebody who couldn’t enjoy eating unless he knew somebody else was hungry.
― Mary Karr, The Liars' Club

After Mother got her picture, we all stood around the fire truck eating moon-shaped cookies dusted with powdered sugar that the mayor's wife had brought in some Tupperware. It was stuff like that that'd break your heart about Leechfield, what Daddy meant when he said the town was too ugly not to love.
― Mary Karr, The Liars' Club

Those are only rumors of suffering. Real suffering has a face and a smell. It lasts in the most intense form no matter what you drape over it. And it knows your name.
― Mary Karr, The Liars' Club

I kept the fingers of my left hand crossed all the time, while on my right-hand fingers I counted anything at all—steps to the refrigerator, seconds on the clock, words in a sentence—to keep my head occupied. The counting felt like something to hang on to, as if finding the right numbers might somehow crack the code on whatever system ran the slippery universe we were moving through.
― Mary Karr, The Liars' Club

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, The Liars' Club