"I loved the idea that looking at a painting or listening to a concerto could make you somehow 'transcend' the day-in, day-out bullshit that grinds you down: how in one instant of pure attention you could draw something inside that made you forever larger."
"Because it took so long for me to paste together what happened, I will leave that part of the story missing for a while. It went long unformed for me, and I want to keep it that way here. I don't mean to be coy. When the truth would be unbearable, the mind often just blanks it out. But some ghost of an event may stay in your head. Then, like the smudge of a bad word quickly wiped off a school blackboard, this ghost can call undue attention to itself by its very vagueness. You keep studying the dim shape of it, as if the original form will magically emerge. This blank spot in my past, then, spoke most loudly to me by being blank. It was a hole in my life that I both feared and kept coming back to because I couldn't quite fill it in."
- Excerpts from The Liars' Club, by Mary Karr
