The Liars' Club Quotes

“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

“Daddy said a Republican was somebody who couldn’t enjoy eating unless he knew somebody else was hungry,”
― 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

“And you snap out of it. Or are snapped out of it. Never again will you lay a hand against yourself, not as long as there are plums to eat and somebody--anybody--who gives enough of a damn to haul them to you. So long as you bear the least nibblet of love for any other creature in this dark world, though in love portions are never stingy. There are no smidgens on pinches, only rolling abundance. That's how you acquire the resolution for survival that the upcoming years are about to demand. You don't give it. You earn it.”
― 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

“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

“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, The Liars' Club

“At some point the talk got heated, and Paolo called Mother a strumpet, for which Daddy was said to have stomped a serious mudhole in Paolo's ass.”
― Mary Karr, The Liars' Club

“He was so proud that she had more going on north of her neck than her hairdo.”
― Mary Karr, The Liars' Club

“A pool game mixes ritual with geometry.”
― Mary Karr, The Liars' Club

“I couldn't have been more than six, but I was calling her an ignorant little bitch. Her momma stood on the porch step shaking her mop at me and saying there were snakes and lizards coming out of my mouth, to which I said i didn't give a shit.”
― Mary Karr, The Liars' Club

“The fact that my house was Not Right metastasized into the notion that I myself was somehow Not Right, or that my survival in the world depended on my constant vigilance against various forms of Not-Rightness.”
― Mary Karr, The Liars' Club

“I lock all my scaredness down in my stomach until the fear hardens into something I hardly notice. I myself harden into a person that I hardly notice.”
― Mary Karr, The Liars' Club

“The first night he slept with her, he took a washrag and a jug of wood alcohol to get rid of her makeup, saying he wanted to know what he was getting into.”
― Mary Karr, The Liars' Club

“Before that summer, I had many times heard long-winded Baptist preachers take ten minutes to pray over card tables of potato salad and fried chicken at church picnics, but the way those sweating, red-faced men sat around on stacked pallets of lumber gulping oysters taught me most of what I knew about simple gladness.”
― 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

“When the truth would be unbearable the mind often just blanks it out. But some ghost of an event may stay in your head. Then, like the smudge of a bad word quickly wiped off a school blackboard, this ghost can call undue attention to itself by its very vagueness. You keep studying the dim shape of it, as if the original form will magically emerge. This blank spot in my past, then, spoke most loudly to me by being blank. It was a hole in my life that I both feared and kept coming back to because I couldn’t quite fill it in.”
― Mary Karr, The Liars' Club

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

“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, The Liars' Club

“The image pleases me enough : to slip from the body's tight container and into some luminous womb, gliding there without effort till the distant shapes glow brighter and more familiar, till all your beloveds hover before you, their lit arms held out in welcome.”
― Mary Karr, The Liars' Club

“They feed us the way the bread of communion does, with a nourishment that seems to form new flesh. According”
― Mary Karr, The Liars' Club

“A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. —Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian”
― Mary Karr, The Liars' Club

“I’ve plumb forgot where I am for an instant, which is how a good lie should take you.”
― Mary Karr, The Liars' Club

“The week the local paper carried a story about the boy’s incarceration and lobotomy in the state hospital at Rusk, the guys at the refinery pitched the kid’s daddy a party complete with balloons and noisemakers.”
― Mary Karr, The Liars' Club

“Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild, elsewise every raped baby would grow up to raped.”
― Mary Karr, The Liars' Club

“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, The Liars' Club

“The lady in Chicago survived, she told me, through stories. Which is at the core of traditional therapy: retelling the family saga. Talk about it, the old wisdom says, and you get better. From narratives about childhood, this woman manufactured a self, neither cut off from her past nor mired in it.”
― Mary Karr, The Liars' Club

“(Silence can make somebody bigger, I’ve come to believe. Grief can, too. A big sad silence emanating from someone can cause you to invest that person with all manner of gravitas.)”
― Mary Karr, The Liars' Club

“No matter how many tangents he took or how far the tale flew from its starting point before he reeled it back, he had this gift: he knew how to be believed.”
― Mary Karr, The Liars' Club