I Get So Lonely Sometimes, I Could

I'm Bred For Farm Work, And For Such Folk, The Only A's You Get Come From Effort. Strife And Strain Are All The World Can Offer, And They Temper You Into Something Unbreakable Because Lord Knows They'll Try -- Without Let Up -- To Break You.

Age About 30, I Stopped Looking Up My Books In Bookstores. Paying Attention To The Marketplace Isn't A Healthy Thing For Me.

Even The Best Of Us Are At Least Part-time Bastards.

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.

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.