Top 100 Marisha Pessl Quotes
#1. There was quantum mechanics, string theory, and then there was the most mind-bending frontier of the natural world, women.
Marisha Pessl
#2. 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?'
Marisha Pessl
#3. Sadly, American teenagers are to a weightless vacuum as seat cushions are to polyurethane foam -
Marisha Pessl
#4. I'd actually questioned my sanity, wondered if this was it: the substandard past few years had finally led to a mental break with reality, and now, floodgates open, there'd be no limit to the fiends I'd encounter. They'd simply crawl out of my head, down into the world.
Marisha Pessl
#5. It's a common feeling for people to feel intermittent antipathy toward individuals they're familiar with.
Marisha Pessl
#6. Fuck you," she said, giggling. "And your little dog too.
Marisha Pessl
#7. Well, it doesn't look good. Makes me look like one of those unloved latchkey children they make after-school specials about."
"Don't sell yourself short. You're more Masterpiece Theatre.
Marisha Pessl
#8. Look at Picasso. O'Neill. Tennessee Williams. Capote. Were these shiny happy people spreading sunshine? No. Only the greatest of personal demons can force you to do powerful work.
Marisha Pessl
#9. It was at this time I learned that the human mind is a blackened overgrown place. Society tries to mow the lawn and trim back the plants, but every one of us is just days away from a wild jungle. And it's the jungle that interests me.
Marisha Pessl
#10. Such things as anguish, woe, affliction, guilt, feelings of awfulness, and utter wretchedness, the bread and butter of Days of Yore and Russians, sadly have very little staying power in these lickety-split Modern Times.
Marisha Pessl
#11. Time leeches most horror and pain from our memories.
Marisha Pessl
#12. I was aware too how strange adults were, how theirs lives were vaster than they wanted anyone to realize, that they actually stretched on and on like deserts, dry and desolate, with an unpredictable, shifting sea of dunes.
Marisha Pessl
#14. She looked at me as if I were a snag in tights.
Marisha Pessl
#15. If I scribbled a few words on a cocktail napkin and showed it to my family, they'd proclaim it astonishing and more culturally relevant than the Bible.
Marisha Pessl
#16. When men desire each other, they crash together like wrecking balls, quenching their need right then and there, as if the world were about to end.
Marisha Pessl
#17. Watching a midforties Wonder Woman stumble backward into Hannah's net stack of Traveler magazines made me wonder if the very idea of Growing Up was a sham, the bus out of town you're so busy waiting for, you don't notice it never actually comes.
Marisha Pessl
#18. It is adorable and healthily childlike secretly to believe in fairy tales, but the instant one articulates such viewpoints to other people, one goes from darling to dumbo, from childlike to chillingly out of touch with reality.
Marisha Pessl
#19. Mr. Archer being EARTH FRIENDLY was APPARATUS HOSTILE.
Marisha Pessl
#20. Well, everyone and their grandmother knows she's still
banging Charles after all these years - "
"Like a screen in a tornado. Sure.
Marisha Pessl
#21. As much as some people would like to believe, for their own peace of mind, that the appearance of evil in this world had a clean cause, the truth was never that simple.
Marisha Pessl
#22. She was inches from my face, really squinting, as if it were a section of a globe she'd never closely inspected before, an ocean filled with strings of unnamed islands.
Marisha Pessl
#24. (the Boston Tea Party was the work of 1777-era frat boys)
Marisha Pessl
#25. A man so far out of his league he suffered from altitude sickness.
Marisha Pessl
#26. We aren't on Earth to be happy, but to experience incredible things.
Marisha Pessl
#27. When you grow up
and from the look of things, you have awhile
but you learn things never go back to normal simply because everyone's sorry. Sorry is ridiculous.
Marisha Pessl
#28. I think I've heard this story before. He died alone?"
"Everyone dies alone.
Marisha Pessl
#29. One of my pet peeves was when an adult imagined they had to encapsulate Life for you, hand you Life in a jar, in an eyedropper, in a penguin paperweight full of snow-A Collector's Dream.
Marisha Pessl
#30. Maybe she was really good at improv. I couldn't be certain she was nineteen or that her name really was Nora Halliday. Maybe she was like one of those sweaters with an innocent little thread hanging off of it: One pull, the whole thing unraveled.
Marisha Pessl
#31. Not returning phone calls is the severest form of torture in the civilized world.
Marisha Pessl
#32. Happiness is a hound dog in the sun. We aren't on Earth to be happy, but to experience incredible things.
- Hannah Schneider
Marisha Pessl
#33. His characters are ravaged, beaten. They walk through infernos and emerge charred doves.
Marisha Pessl
#34. I actually felt awed by the remote possibilities of the person you liked ever liking you back a corresponding amount.
Marisha Pessl
#35. But you go through with it, continue to fight, because you hope one day it won't be like this. Life can be so cruel. It doles out just enough hope to keep you going, like a small cup of water and one slice of bread to someone on the verge of starvation.
Marisha Pessl
#36. 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.
Marisha Pessl
#37. Is she sad? she asked.
No, honey. She's lived-in.
Marisha Pessl
#38. A deus ex machina will never appear in real life so you best make other arrangements.
Marisha Pessl
#39. Moe was a triple threat."
"He could sing, dance, and act?"
She shook her head. "He could speak Armenian, saddle break a stallion, and pass for a female in drag.
Marisha Pessl
#40. 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.
Marisha Pessl
#41. I haven't always been a writer and I suppose I tiptoed around the idea of writing full time, because it's so isolating.
Marisha Pessl
#42. There was an unspoken understanding that when a reporter chased a story, hunches and theories became airborne and other reporters could catch them like a cold.
Marisha Pessl
#43. But when you flee someone, no matter how far you roam, that person will follow you as doggedly as the stars.
Marisha Pessl
#44. I know Long Island like I know my kitchen. I understand it's there for my pleasure and enjoyment, but somehow I never manage to go there.
Marisha Pessl
#45. All worthwhile tales possess some element of violence.
Marisha Pessl
#46. It was as if Hannah had sprung a leak and her character, usually so meticulous and contained, was spilling all over the place.
Marisha Pessl
#47. Dad's romances could last anywhere between a platypus egg incubation (19-21 days) and a squirrel pregnancy (24-45 days).
Marisha Pessl
#49. It's wonderful to get lost in a piece of music, she'd said. To forget your name for a while.
Marisha Pessl
#50. You think you know everything. But you don't. Life and people are right in front of you and you act superior and make jokes but it's just a cover for the fact that you're scared.
Marisha Pessl
#51. That was women for you
always morphing. One minute they were helpless, needing shelter and English muffins, the next they were ruthlessly bending you to their will like you were a piece of sheet metal.
Marisha Pessl
#52. 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.
Marisha Pessl
#53. It was never the act itself but our own understanding of it that defeated us, over and over again.
Marisha Pessl
#54. The dark side of life has a way of finding us all anyway, so stop chasing it.
Marisha Pessl
#55. They looked happy, but, of course, that didn't say much. Everyone smiles for a photograph.
Marisha Pessl
#56. It's got to be some kind of cult. Anyone offers you Kool-Aid or a hot shower, say no.
Marisha Pessl
#57. Books give us new lives, loves, and the feeling we aren't alone.
Marisha Pessl
#59. . . .perhaps she figured I was already a highly forgiving person, that I did my best to treat shortcomings like hobos I'd found dozing on my porch: take them in and maybe they'll work for you.
Marisha Pessl
#60. Millions of people walked through their lives numb, dying to feel something, to feel alive. To be chosen by Cordova for a film was an opportunity for just that, not simply for fame and fortune, but to leave their old selves behind like discarded clothes.
Marisha Pessl
#61. Good bands you can kind of lose, then come back and realize they're still good.
Marisha Pessl
#62. WELCOME TO THE BLACKBOARDS
This is the Cordovites' premier wormhole, where time ticks backward, trees grow down, light eats itself, fear is an opening, and life is Sovereign, Deadly, Perfect.
Marisha Pessl
#63. They're weak, petty, so apathetic about this gift of life as if it were all a mere Pepsi commercial.
Marisha Pessl
#64. Within every elaborate lie, a kernel of truth.
Marisha Pessl
#65. Secrets - even in hardened criminals, they were just air pockets lodged under debris at the bottom of an ocean. It might take an earthquake, or you scuba diving down there, sifting through the sludge, but their natural proclivity was always to head straight to the surface - to get out.
Marisha Pessl
#66. Take as much care with words expressing your sentiments as you will crafting your doctoral dissertation.
Marisha Pessl
#67. It's funny how the night that changes your life forever starts out like all the others.
Marisha Pessl
#68. Everyone has a Cordova story, whether they like it or not.
Marisha Pessl
#70. To be sensitive is fine, but it makes day-to-day living- life -rather painful.
Marisha Pessl
#71. Sometimes it takes more courage not to let yourself see. Sometimes knowledge is damaging - not enlightenment but enleadenment.
Marisha Pessl
#72. 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.
Marisha Pessl
#73. Women of Manhattan, magnificent as they were, they forgot sometimes they weren't immortal. They could throw themselves like confetti into a fun-filled Friday night, with no thought as to what crack they fell into by Saturday.
Marisha Pessl
#74. Magic was all fun and games until you had the H-bomb of spell materials on the bottom of your shoes.
Marisha Pessl
#75. When I'm creating characters, I definitely think of theme songs. Writing for me is very visual, so I sometimes think of it in terms of a movie with a soundtrack, and try to transfer that to words.
Marisha Pessl
#76. She was lost now, she'd been silenced- another dead branch on Cordova's warped tree.
Marisha Pessl
#77. All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and when it comes to the Holiday Season, happy families can abruptly become unhappy and unhappy families can, to their great alarm, be happy
Marisha Pessl
#78. 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.
Marisha Pessl
#79. ... deep-diving love, a love that excavates you. It's something you have to have before you die in order to have lived.
Marisha Pessl
#81. (Carnations) The only flower that, when given to someone, is marginally superior to dead ones.
Marisha Pessl
#82. When your child is seized by an idea with the zeal of a fundamentalist Bible salesman from Indiana, stand in his or her way at your own risk.
Marisha Pessl
#83. Somewhere in a woman's room there is always something, an object, a detail, that is her, wholly and unapologetic.
Marisha Pessl
#84. I'd have to, if on Sunday I wanted to run
off with some "slack-jawed Suzy," some "invertebrate," a "post-pubescent
wasteoid who imagines the Khmer Rouge to be makeup and Guerrilla Warfare
to be that rivalry which occurs between apes.
Marisha Pessl
#85. Somewhere, nearby voices filled with dusk, cabs and panhandlers and one drunken girl screeching like a wounded bird - all of it flushed with a warmth and sad beauty I'd never noticed before.
Marisha Pessl
#86. Maybe it was a consequence of reaching the end of the end, finding out the dark, mad, gleaming tale had concluded the only way it could in the real world
with mortal people doing mortal things, a father and daughter, facing their deaths.
Marisha Pessl
#87. 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.
Marisha Pessl
#88. Sometimes people can surprise the hell outta you. Sometimes they can tear your heart out and turn it to putty, can't they?
Marisha Pessl
#89. It's one of the biggest scandals of life, to learn that the cruelest thing someone could say to you was you were a terrible kisser.
Marisha Pessl
#90. Grab the work when it comes, my man. Your competition is now a fourteen-year-old in pajamas with the username Truth-ninja-12 who believes fact-checking a story is reading his subject's Twitter feed. Be afraid.
Marisha Pessl
#92. Landlocked Switzerland: They're Nice and Neutral Only Because They're Tiny
Marisha Pessl
#93. I thus concluded, with the same awe of Jane Goodall discovering the chimpanzees' nimble use of tools to extract termites, it really wasn't so much the tragic event itself, but others having knowledge of it that prevented recovery.
Marisha Pessl
#94. I think every writer has a book that haunts them, and on some level, every book you write is a reaction to it. 'Lolita' is that book for me. Nabokov's love of wordplay, descriptive detail, artfully complex plots, and his themes of obsession and lost love, are inspiring.
Marisha Pessl
#95. I hate how the people who really get you are the ones you can never hold on to for very long. And the ones who don't understand you at all stick around.
Marisha Pessl
#96. I was aware now, as ever, that between all people there were First Times You See Them and Last Times you See Them.
Marisha Pessl
#97. The million-dollar marital Band-Aid, never a wise idea.
Marisha Pessl
#98. Occasionally when I'm procrastinating writing, I'll while away the hours on iTunes. You can just keep going forever and find these bands you'd never normally hear of.
Marisha Pessl
#100. The notes weren't played," he went on, "They were poured from a Grecian urn.
Marisha Pessl
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