Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else's suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take communion, you make a community with others.

— Mary Karr

Poetry privileges music and is aesthetically more challenging. Prose privileges information and is emotionally more challenging.

— Mary Karr

Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time.

— Mary Karr

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

— Mary Karr

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

— 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.

— Mary Karr

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

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 both there—hot boudin 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 American religion-so far as there is one anymore-seems to be doubt. Whoever believes the least wins, because he'll never be found wrong.

— Mary Karr

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