A Quote by Mary Karr

I'd spent way more years worrying about how to look like a poet -- buying black clothes, smearing on scarlet lipstick, languidly draping myself over thrift-store furniture -- than I had learning how to assemble words in some discernible order.

Mary Karr

Quote Topics

About Assemble Black Black Clothes Buying Clothes Furniture Had How Learning Like Lipstick Look More Myself Order Over Poet Scarlet Some Spent Store Than Thrift Way Words Worrying Years

Quote Author

Mary Karr
American - Poet
Born: January 16, 1955

If you do something really cognitively demanding, like buying furniture, it turns out buying furniture is one of the most difficult things we do. Go into a furniture store and look at a sofa.

David Brooks

Our look evolved from the fact that we bought thrift-store clothes. It wasn't like, 'Let adopt a thrift-store aesthetic.' We just didn't have any money.

Fred Schneider

I feel like I have to avoid certain thrift store-isms, having been known for the thrift store paintings. It's like I have to not paint that way.

Jim Shaw

I started out as a poet who primarily wanted to write about image and moment. Over the years I've been trying to teach myself how to do plot and scene. My first story collection had the most issues with the plotlessness, and when I was writing my second collection I was teaching myself how to make things happen.

Dan Chaon

On 'Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,' I spent two or three months learning how to ride a motorcycle. I wasn't really riding the motorcycle in 98 percent of the movie, but the shots of me getting on and off had to look like I had been doing it for years and years.

Rooney Mara

Communication is the most important skill in life. We spend most of our waking hours communicating. But consider this: You've spent years learning how to read and write, years learning how to speak. But what about listening?

Stephen Covey

I had talked to my agent a lot over the years about not being interested in stereotypical "black films" [because] I didn't like the way they were representing black people over and over and over again in the same way.

Zoe Kravitz

When you look at the runway now, the girls are 15 and 16 years old with no knowledge of clothes, no idea how to project themselves. I was trained how to show off the dress, how to move to make the clothes look better.

China Machado

Stories are a kind of thing, too. Stories and objects share something, a patina. I thought I had this clear, two years ago before I started, but I am no longer sure how this works. Perhaps a patina is a process of rubbing back so that the essential is revealed, the way that a striated stone tumbled in a river feels irreducible, the way that this netsuke of a fox has become little more than a memory of a nose and a tail. But it also seems additive, in the way that a piece of oak furniture gains over years and years of polishing, and the way the leaves of my medlar shine.

Edmund de Waal

I think I'm a reporter's editor. Being a good reporter is a specific skill, one I admire and don't possess myself - I appreciate people who know how to ask the right questions, who are excellent researchers, who know how to assemble information, and I enjoy working with them to shape their information into an article. Good reporters tend to be receptive to editing, and to a more collaborative form of writing in general, and you always end up learning more from how they work than you expect you will.

Hanya Yanagihara

I spent so much of my time when I was growing up just worrying about what people thought of me, about my appearance, how I should act in school, how to... be popular and all that rubbish. Stop worrying about everything. Everything's going to be okay.

Jade Thirlwall

I think that we could be more careful about what we're saying to young women in terms of their expectations. It's unrealistic to expect people to always be in designer clothes. Girls growing up deserve more freedom in how they look and how they feel about how they look.

Emily Procter

Housing Works is the coolest thrift store in the world, because not only are they the best thrift store - they're not the most thrifty thrift store - but they have amazing stuff and all of their proceeds go directly to kids, mostly homeless kids, living with AIDS and HIV in New York, in the metropolitan area.

Ezra Miller

I don't love the way I look. Nobody does, and if they do, I don't want to be that person's friend. But we all know what we're insecure about. The question I had as I was writing was, 'How are these things affecting the way I live? How am I compensating because I don't like this about myself? What do I do to cover it up?'

Tyler Joseph

We don't have great answers to what jobs will look like in 10, 20, 30 years. And I think it's right for people to have some anxiety in a world where driverless cars are going to take over. Like, how are you going - it's gotten really, how are you going to have a job in 10 years, and how are your kids going to have a job in 10 years, if you haven't gone to college or had a lot of hand-ups in the system, basically.