Cherry Quotes

“No road offers more mystery than that first one you mount from the town you were born to, the first time you mount it of your own volition, on a trip funded by your own coffee tin of wrinkled up dollars - bills you've saved and scrounged for, worked the all-night switchboard for, missed the Rolling Stones for, sold fragrant pot with smashed flowers going brown inside twist-tie plastic baggies for. In fact, to disembark from your origins, you've done everything you can think to scrounge money save selling your spanking young pussy.”
― Mary Karr, Cherry

“And Meredith says that reminds her of a Camus novel, the one about the plague, and she tells the story of it, the tale holding you in thrall, and she ends her version with a line you’ll write down in your notebook, the place where the atheist doctor hollers at a priest: All your certainties aren’t worth one strand of a woman’s hair.”
― Mary Karr, Cherry

“The changes are coming fast and blind now, and in your skull sits an hourglass with a grain size hole through which numb seconds are sliding.”
― Mary Karr, Cherry

“Your mother rolls her eyes at the cat lapping grapefruit juice, says, "Everything that comes into this house is crazy - whether we choose them for that or they get that way, I don't know.”
― Mary Karr, Cherry

“The words and sentences you take into your body from books are no less sacred and healing than communion. Surely at least one such person lives in your zip code.”
― Mary Karr, Cherry

“The trick in that town was getting through a night at all without stalling in the sludge of your own thoughts.”
― Mary Karr, Cherry

“But the boys' bicycle pack also sent a stab of envy through me. If I couldn't yet capture John Cleary with my feminine wiles, then surely I deserved to enjoy the physical abandon he got, liberties I instinctively knew were vanishing. (I know, I know. Psychoanalytic theory would label this pecker envy and seek to smack me on the nose with it. To that I'd say, o please. Of actual johnsons I had little awareness. What I coveted was privilege.)”
― Mary Karr, Cherry

“KIDS IN DISTRESSED FAMILIES ARE GREAT repositories of silence and carry in their bodies whole arctic wastelands of words not to be uttered, stories not to be told.”
― Mary Karr, Cherry

“Every day I feel more like some defeated matador limping out of the arena after I've been gored, or like some general coming back from a long battle.”
― Mary Karr, Cherry

“When you do try to picture the boys who do ask you out, they're absolutely featureless, like old carvings eroded by centuries of rain and wind.”
― Mary Karr, Cherry

“It strikes me that whatever advantages there are to being a boy—getting to stay out late and having other people wash your clothes and bring you plates of stuff---get undercut by having to play football.”
― Mary Karr, Cherry

“You're inside at the kitchen table wolfing cereal when she says, 'you have accomplished a great thing.'

You say, 'and what would that be, bwana?'

Meredith says, 'you're your same self.'

The truth of this flickers past you, gnat-like. For years, you've felt only half done inside, cobbled together by paper clips, held intact by gum wads and school paste. But something solid is starting to assemble inside you.

You say, 'I am my same self. That's not nothing, is it?'

That catchphrase will serve as a touchstone for years to come, an instant you'll return to after traveling the far roads. Like everything else, Meredith thought it up.

You were there solely for embellishment and witness: you were there to watch.”
― Mary Karr, Cherry

“You used to look out the window of your daddy's truck riding to the Towne House and imagine that somewhere from one of these tract houses amid the razor grass and the industrial-maze skyline of contorted steel, a boy riding to the dance might also be pretending that he was being ferried over snowy hills in a Russian sledge. Or perhaps in another truck cab, a girl your age was rethumbing Catcher in the Rye and half believing that in the Towne House Holden Caulfield would be waiting under the exit sign in all his wounded, cynical splendor. And that very evening conversation would be struck like a flint, and endless isolate dark illuminated.
But how would such a person find you unless you hung it all out there?”
― Mary Karr, Cherry

“Any nod on serious hallucinogens can become sagelike, and suddenly the group resembles some Bedouin tribe weary with ancient desert wisdom looking down on the scorpion-stung interloper whose tongue is slowly swelling his throat shut.”
― Mary Karr, Cherry

“You could have wallowed forever in the silky infinity of those nights, whereas for him, those wordless conversations were doubtless arrows aimed at this night, precursors to it, erotic cheese and crackers.”
― Mary Karr, Cherry

“It’s distracting the boys, he says.
You ponder what can be said that’s enough of a fuck you. (The problem with fuck you’s in this sort of place is that you habituate them; they lose their potency, and ergo must increase in outrageousness.) Finally you say, What makes you think I’m not wearing a bra, Mr. LeBump?”
― Mary Karr, Cherry

“What if she’s dead?” I said.
“She’ll stay dead,” he said. “She’ll still be dead come morning.”
― Mary Karr, Cherry

“Her mother's injunction on competing with other girls is a challenge, a gauntlet thrown down: "You just have to be smarter than the ones who are prettier and prettier than the ones who are smarter”
― Mary Karr, Cherry: A Memoir

“As for the actual validity of the notion [of] an immovable self, ever-firm, you're there only by half, at best...

You'll spend decades trying to will 'same self' into being. But you'll keep shape-shifting. Probably everyone must, so long as the body's treading sod or drawing breath.

What's unalterable as bronze is the image of your radiant friend that morning barefoot on the porch, with sun in her rampant hair. She's holding out the bowl of fruit loops, and touching your shoulder as if to bestow the right name upon you: the one you'll bear before you through the world, each letter forged into a gleaming shield.”
― Mary Karr, Cherry

“You're inside at the kitchen table wolfing cereal when she says, 'you have accomplished a great thing.'

You say, 'and what would that be, bwana?'

Meredith says, 'you're your same self.'

The truth of this flickers past you, gnat-like. For years, you've felt only half done inside, cobbled together by paper clips, held intact by gum wads and school paste. But something solid is starting to assemble inside you.

You say, 'I am my same self. That's not nothing, is it?'

That catchphrase will serve as a touchstone for years to come, an instant you'll return to after traveling the far roads. Like everything else, Meredith thought it up.

You were there solely for embellishment and witness: you were there to watch.”
― Mary Karr, Cherry