“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.”

“For me, everything's too much and nothing's enough.”

“The Lesson You've Gotto learn is the someday you'll someday stagger to, blinking in cold light, all tearsshed, ready to poke your bovine head in the yoke they've shaped.Everyone learns this. Born, everyonebreathes, pays tax, plants deadand hurts galore. There's grief enough for each. My motherlearned by moving man to man,outlived them all. The parched earth'sbare (once she leaves it) of any who watched the instants I trod it.Other than myself, of course.I've made a study of bearingand forbearance. Everyone does, it turns out, and notethose faces passing by: Not one's a god. ”

“In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said.”

“Your heart, Mary Karr, he'd say. His pen touched my sternum, and it felt for all the world like the point of a dull spear as he said, Your heart knows what your head don't. Or won't.”

“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.”

“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.”