Top 100 Marisha Pessl Quotes
#1. 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
#2. It's wonderful to get lost in a piece of music, she'd said. To forget your name for a while.
Marisha Pessl
#4. Dad's romances could last anywhere between a platypus egg incubation (19-21 days) and a squirrel pregnancy (24-45 days).
Marisha Pessl
#5. 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
#6. I'm not afraid of total failure. In the end, we're all just food for worms, so what are we so worried about?
Marisha Pessl
#7. It sounds like something out of a night film. Not real life.
Marisha Pessl
#8. Life was a freight train barreling toward just one stop, our loved ones streaking past our windows in blurs of color and light. There was no holding on to any of it, and no slowing it down.
Marisha Pessl
#9. All worthwhile tales possess some element of violence.
Marisha Pessl
#10. 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
#11. But when you flee someone, no matter how far you roam, that person will follow you as doggedly as the stars.
Marisha Pessl
#12. 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
#13. America's greatest revelation was not the atom bomb, not Fundamentalism,
not fat farms, not Elvis, not even the quite astute observation that
gentlemen prefer blondes, but the great heights to which she has propelled
ice cream.
Marisha Pessl
#14. We were up the whole night just talking, walking the city. You can walk those blocks forever, take a break on the edge of the fountain, eat pizza and snow cones, awed by the human carnival all around you.
Marisha Pessl
#15. But that was how it went sometimes, the English language, when you really needed it, crumbled to clay in your mouth.
Marisha Pessl
#16. 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
#17. Because he was an asshole. I'm not sayin' nothin' I wouldn't say to his face. He embraced his assholeness.
Marisha Pessl
#18. For every man there exists bait he cannot resist swallowing.
Marisha Pessl
#19. 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
#20. A deus ex machina will never appear in real life so you best make other arrangements.
Marisha Pessl
#21. Is she sad? she asked.
No, honey. She's lived-in.
Marisha Pessl
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. I actually felt awed by the remote possibilities of the person you liked ever liking you back a corresponding amount.
Marisha Pessl
#25. His characters are ravaged, beaten. They walk through infernos and emerge charred doves.
Marisha Pessl
#26. Justice wields an erratic sword, grants mercy to fortunate few. Yet if man doesn't fight for her, 'tis chaos he's left to.
Marisha Pessl
#27. Good bands you can kind of lose, then come back and realize they're still good.
Marisha Pessl
#28. 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
#29. . . .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
#30. The bad things that happen to you don't have to mean anything at all.
Marisha Pessl
#32. Books give us new lives, loves, and the feeling we aren't alone.
Marisha Pessl
#33. It was astounding how a woman, when she struck marital gold, procured not just a new wardrobe and new friends but a new voice straight out of a 1930s gramophone (brittle, mono-stereo) and a vocabulary that reliably included laze, season, and terribly sorry.
Marisha Pessl
#34. 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.
Marisha Pessl
#35. It's got to be some kind of cult. Anyone offers you Kool-Aid or a hot shower, say no.
Marisha Pessl
#36. They looked happy, but, of course, that didn't say much. Everyone smiles for a photograph.
Marisha Pessl
#37. 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 ...
Marisha Pessl
#38. The dark side of life has a way of finding us all anyway, so stop chasing it.
Marisha Pessl
#39. Mortal fear is as crucial a thing to our lives as love. It cuts to the core of our being and shows us what we are. Will you step back and cover your eyes? Or will you have the strength to walk to the precipice and look out?
Marisha Pessl
#40. Because every one of us has our box, a dark chamber stowing the thing that lanced our heart. It contains what you do everything for, strive for, wound everything around you.
Marisha Pessl
#41. It was never the act itself but our own understanding of it that defeated us, over and over again.
Marisha Pessl
#42. They should really tack that on to the marriage ceremony: 'Do you promise to love, honor, obey me, and also to kill me when I can no longer stand in a shower?
Marisha Pessl
#43. One or two individuals in times of crisis turn into Heroes, a handful into Villains, the rest into Fools.
Marisha Pessl
#44. The truth about what happens to us in this world keeps changing ... it never stops.
Marisha Pessl
#45. 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
#46. Is there anything more glorious than a professor? Forget about his molding the minds, the future of a nation - a dubious assertion; there's little you can do when they tend to emerge from the womd predestined for Grand Theft Auto Vice City.
Marisha Pessl
#47. People don't realize how easy life is to change. You just get on the bus.
Marisha Pessl
#48. 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
#49. People had an illogical, self-serving rationale when it came to interpreting the behavior of others.
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. The territory between two people who were once soul mates but were no longer was akin to wandering into Pakistan's tribal region.
Marisha Pessl
#52. In the end, a man turns into what he thinks he is, however large or small. It is the reason why certain people are prone to colds and catastrophe. And why others can dance on water.
Marisha Pessl
#53. 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
#54. Grab what you can and fight your way to a lifeboat.' Everyone associated with the slow printed word is fast becoming the Great Crested Newt of the culture. First it was the poets, the playwrights, then the novelists. Veteran newspapermen are next.
Marisha Pessl
#55. She looked at me as if I were a snag in tights.
Marisha Pessl
#56. Could something be real when all evidence of it was gone? Was something categorically true if it lived on only in your head, same as your dreams?
Marisha Pessl
#57. When he talked about a Higher Power, he used words like gratifying, restorative and life-changing. It was something that "got you through the tough times," which "any young person could manage with a little hard work, trust and tenacity." God was a trip to Cancun.
Marisha Pessl
#59. With the iPiano, anyone can be an iMozart. Then, you could compose your own iRequiem for your own iFuneral attended by millions of your iFriends who iLoved you.
Marisha Pessl
#60. 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
#61. Time leeches most horror and pain from our memories.
Marisha Pessl
#62. You journalists bulldoze life's mysteries, ignorant of what you're so ruthlessly turning up.
Marisha Pessl
#63. The trying to change what they think, the attempt to explain, the hope they'll come to see your side of things, it was exhausting because it never made a dent and afterward you only ached unbearably.
Marisha Pessl
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. What you tend to find in the personal lives of brilliant men is devastation akin to a nuclear bomb going off.
Marisha Pessl
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. Love? Dopamine released in the brain, which gets depleted over time, leaving contempt.
Marisha Pessl
#70. 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
#71. Fuck you," she said, giggling. "And your little dog too.
Marisha Pessl
#72. It's a common feeling for people to feel intermittent antipathy toward individuals they're familiar with.
Marisha Pessl
#73. 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
#74. Sadly, American teenagers are to a weightless vacuum as seat cushions are to polyurethane foam -
Marisha Pessl
#75. 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
#76. There might be a Starbucks on every corner and an iPhone at every ear, but don't worry, people are still fucking crazy.
Marisha Pessl
#77. 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
#78. Not returning phone calls is the severest form of torture in the civilized world.
Marisha Pessl
#79. The deepest secrets about ourselves that we, in the ultimate act of humanity, will spare those we truly love.
Marisha Pessl
#80. 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
#81. It's hard, in America, not to equate 'happiness' with 'things'.
Marisha Pessl
#82. 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
#83. I think I've heard this story before. He died alone?"
"Everyone dies alone.
Marisha Pessl
#84. 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
#85. We aren't on Earth to be happy, but to experience incredible things.
Marisha Pessl
#86. It was cheerful inside, without the aggressive Easy Rider feel of some of the other tattoo parlors in the city, where the handle-jawed thugs wielding the tattoo guns looked like ink was just a side job, their main work, contract killings.
Marisha Pessl
#87. A man so far out of his league he suffered from altitude sickness.
Marisha Pessl
#88. (the Boston Tea Party was the work of 1777-era frat boys)
Marisha Pessl
#89. There was quantum mechanics, string theory, and then there was the most mind-bending frontier of the natural world, women.
Marisha Pessl
#91. 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
#92. What, really, was the difference between something hounding you and something leading you somewhere?
Marisha Pessl
#93. No way, man. I got one rule as a driver."
"What's that?"
"Never look in da rearview mirror."
"Never?" We drifted into the left-hand lane, cutting off a cab.
"It's not healthy to keep a' watchin' what you leavin' behind.
Marisha Pessl
#94. 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
#95. Well, everyone and their grandmother knows she's still
banging Charles after all these years - "
"Like a screen in a tornado. Sure.
Marisha Pessl
#96. But it could also be an enslavement, a hell, to keep searching for the enchanted, keep plunging down, down to the lonely chambers of the sea. To seek mermaids.
It was a tragic thing to do, like looking for Eden.
Marisha Pessl
#97. Mr. Archer being EARTH FRIENDLY was APPARATUS HOSTILE.
Marisha Pessl
#98. Because I saw, suddenly, how it would always be for me, Sam's life unfolding like slides in an old projector I'd always be clicking through in the dark, stunning leaps forward in time--but never the uncut reel.
Marisha Pessl
#99. 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
#100. 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
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