## Metadata - Author: [[Mary Karr]] - Full Title: The Liars' Club - Category: #books ## Highlights - In ancient epics, when somebody boffs a girl or slays somebody or just generally gets heated up, he can usually blame ate, a kind of raging passion, pseudo-demonic, that banishes reason. So Agamemnon, having robbed Achilles of his girlfriend, said, “I was blinded by ate and Zeus took away my understanding.” ([Location 284](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008LY24II&location=284)) - My mother didn’t date, she married. ([Location 341](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008LY24II&location=341)) - Daddy was said to have stomped a serious mudhole in Paolo’s ass. ([Location 379](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008LY24II&location=379)) - She’d lost some things along the way, and losing things scared her. ([Location 389](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008LY24II&location=389)) - Other than that and such luxuries as calico for dresses, they grew and shot and caught what they needed. That world was long gone before my birth, but I remember it. In fact, my father told me so many stories about his childhood that it seems in most ways more vivid to me than my own. His stories got told and retold before an audience of drinking men he played dominoes with on days off. They met at the American Legion or in the back room of Fisher’s Bait Shop at times when their wives thought they were paying bills or down at the union hall. Somebody’s pissed-off wife eventually christened them the Liars’ Club, and it stuck. Certainly not much of the truth in any technical sense got told there. Except for Christmas Eve morning, when they met in the Legion parking lot at dawn to exchange identical gift bottles of Jack Daniel’s from the windows of their pickups, the men had no official meeting time and place. I never saw evidence of any planning. They never called each other on the phone. No one’s wife or kids ever carried a message to meet at thus-and-such a place. ([Location 398](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008LY24II&location=398)) - he had this gift: he knew how to be believed. He ([Location 414](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008LY24II&location=414)) - Even now the scene seems so real to me that I can’t but write it in the present tense. ([Location 420](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008LY24II&location=420)) - And he looks up at me serious as polio and says, ‘You git the coffee?’” ([Location 461](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B008LY24II&location=461))