Mary Karr Quotes

If you don't get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don't want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can't hold on to it forever.

When you try to avoid the pain, it creates greater pain.

For we are born in other's pain, and perish in our own.

Man is subject to innumerable pains and sorrows by the very condition of humanity, and yet, as if nature had not sown evils enough in life, we are continually adding grief to grief and aggravating the common calamity by our cruel treatment of one another.

I think there's always a bit of pain in everything that's ecstatic - relationships and love, they always come with pain.

Although I think I'm relatively happy as a person, I think there's something unhappy at the root of all my writing. I'd say optimistic but unhappy. Nothing that's particularly original, other than that we're going to live and die, and terrible things happen.

The main cause of suffering is egoistic desire for one's own comfort and happiness.

To be a human being is to suffer. But it's the unnecessary suffering, it's the suffering that we visit upon one another, that really should be stopped.

Happiness is a bull's-eye, awaiting arrows of pain.

Where desire ends up causing suffering is when it fixates.

The tragedy of our lives is that, while we suffer from the wounds afflicted on us by those who love us, we cannot avoid wounding those we want to love.

All conflict comes from attachment.

I think you are wrong to want a heart. It makes most people unhappy. If you only knew it, you are in luck not to have a heart.

Since desire always goes towards that which is our direct opposite, it forces us to love that which will make us suffer.

The origin of sorrow is this: to wish for something that does not come to pass.

No sadness is greater than in misery to rehearse memories of joy.

I wish I were dead, or that it were tomorrow night,' groaned Phil.

It is in everybody's interest to seek those [actions] that lead to happiness and avoid those which lead to suffering. And because our interests are inextricably linked, we are compelled to accept ethics as the indispensable interface between my desire to be happy and yours.

When you're comfortable and secure, it's not enough. The mind doesn't stop there because it has to continue to focus itself as this body, so it moves to pleasure. And pleasure really is a non-existent thing. When we're experiencing pleasure, we're trying to hold onto it as it leaves, so it really isn't pleasure. Pleasure is pain because we're grasping.

A woman whom we need and who makes us suffer elicits from us a whole gamut of feelings far more profound and vital than a man of genius who interests us.

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

People hurt each other. That's what people do.

And so, irritants, it is with this that I leave you. You are spared so that you can think of what it really is to live in a world that engenders a pain for which there is no comfort. Here is your product! You have the rest of your lives to think of this. And I suggest you think quickly, for a long life is never a guarantee.

Misery is a guest that we are glad to part with, however certain of her speedy return.

Where was it ever promised us that life on this earth can ever be easy, free from conflict and uncertainty, devoid of anguish and wonder and pain? Those who seek the folly of unrelieved 'happiness'-who fear moods, who shun solitude, who do not know the diginity of occasional depression-can find bliss easily enough: in tranquilizing pills, or in senility. The purpose of life is not to be happy.