Marisha Pessl Quotes

Sometimes it takes more courage not to let yourself see. Sometimes knowledge is damaging - not enlightenment but enleadenment.

It's not fair. It's not. But then, that's the game. It makes life great. The fact that it ends when we don't want it to. The ending gives it meaning.

Freak the ferocious out.

Funnily enough, it is the subject one dreads talking about at length one ends up talking about at length, often without the slightest provocation.

People had an illogical, self-serving rationale when it came to interpreting the behavior of others.

It’s what we chase but never find. It is the mystery of our lives, the understanding that even when we have everything we want it is one day to leave us. It’s the something unseen, the lurking devastation, the darkness that gives our lives dimension.

...I couldn't let go of the thought that it had, in fact, been he, restless and moody Heathcliff. Day after day, he floated through all the Wal-Marts in America, searching for me in a million lonely aisles.

Life had been a suit I'd only put on for special occasions. Most of the time I kept it in the back of my closet, forgetting it was there. We were meant to die when it was barely stitched anymore, when the elbows and knees were stained with grass and mud, shoulder pads uneven from people hugging you all the time, downpours and blistering sun, the fabric faded, buttons gone.

Certainly one of the surprising truths of having a book published is realizing that your book is as open to interpretation as an abstract painting. People bring their own beliefs and attitudes to your work, which is thrilling and surprising at the same time.

Like that lightning that comes out of the blue when there's not even a storm going on, just a crazy crack in the sky. With something like that right in front of you, you can't help but feel there's new possibilities out there.

May you walk a lighted path. May you fight for truth - your truth, not someone else's - and may you understand, above all things, that you are the most important concept, theory, and philosophy I have ever known.

... suddenly I was a kid in the hall standing outside my locker about to head to Math. But that was how it went sometimes, the English language, when you really needed it, crumbled to clay in your mouth. That's when all the real things were said.

The late great Horace Lloyd Swithin (1844-1917), British essayist, lecturer, satirist, and social observer, wrote in his autobiographical Appointments, 1890-1901 (1902), "When one travels abroad, one doesn't so much discover the hidden Wonders of the World, but the hidden wonders of the individuals with whom one is traveling. They may turn out to afford a stirring view, a rather dull landscape, or a terrain so treacherous one finds it's best to forget the entire affair and return home.

Sovereign. Deadly. Perfect.

In America, people of a certain age ask, 'Where were you when Kennedy was shot?' In my house you were more likely to be asked, 'Where were you when you first read 'The Catcher In The Rye?

He said you couldn't pretend the terrible things in life didn't happen. You can't clean it up. You keep all the refuse and the scars. It's how you learn. And try to make improvements.

Within every elaborate lie, a kernel of truth.

She told me her father taught her to live life way beyond the cusp of it, way out in the outer reaches where most people never had the guts to go, where you got hurt. Where there was unimaginable beauty and pain ... They were always reminding themselves to stop measuring life in coffee spoons, mornings and afternoons, to keep swimming way, way down to the bottom of the ocean to find where the mermaids sang, each to each. Where there was danger and beauty and light. Only the now.

Juliet and Romeo be damned, you can't be in love until you've flossed your teeth next to the person at least three hundred times.

Betrayal isn't ridiculous. It's the reason empires fall.

I'm not afraid of total failure. In the end, we're all just food for worms, so what are we so worried about?

Some people, every now and then, simply had to have One Too Many, go drifty voiced and slouch mouthed, swimming willfully around in their own sadness as if it were hot springs.

What, really, was the difference between something hounding you and something leading you somewhere?

Not returning phone calls is the severest form of torture in the civilized world.

Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last.

It's kind of funny...the moments on which life hinges. I think growing up you always imagine your life - your success - depends on your family and how much money they have, where you go to college, what sort of job you can pin down, starting salary...But it doesn't, you know. You wouldn't believe this, but life hinges on a couple of seconds you never see coming. And what you decide in those few seconds determines everything from then on... And you have no idea what you'll do until you're there.

I was aware now, as ever, that between all people there were First Times You See Them and Last Times you See Them.

Sadly, American teenagers are to a weightless vacuum as seat cushions are to polyurethane foam -

Sometimes it takes more courage not to let yourself see. Sometimes knowledge is damaging - not enlightenment but enleadenment. If one recognizes the difference and prepares oneself - it is extraordinarily brave. Because when it comes to certain human miseries, the only witnesses should be the pavement and maybe the trees. (Gareth van Meer)

Making love to Aurelia was like rummaging through a card catalog in a deserted library, searching for one very obscure, little-read entry on Hungarian poetry.

You journalists bulldoze life's mysteries, ignorant of what you're so ruthlessly turning up.

It’s hard, in America, not to equate ‘happiness’ with ‘things’.

Happiness is a hound dog in the sun. We aren't on Earth to be happy, but to experience incredible things. - Hannah Schneider

It's a common feeling for people to feel intermittent antipathy toward individuals they're familiar with.

Good bands you can kind of lose, then come back and realize they're still good.