Marisha Pessl Quotes

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.

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?'

Dad once noted (somewhat morbidly, I thought at the time) that American institutions would be infinitely more successful in facilitating the pursuit of knowledge if they held classes at night, rather than in the daytime, from 8:00 PM to 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning. As I ran through the darkness, I understood what he meant. Frank red brick, sunny classrooms, symmetrical quads and courts--it was a setting that mislead kids to believe that Knowledge, that Life itself, was bright, clear, and freshly mowed. Dad said a student would be infinitely better off going out into the world if he/she studied the periodic table of elements, Madame Bovary (Flaubert, 1857), the sexual reproduction of a sunflower for example, with deformed shadows congregating on the classroom walls, the silhouettes of fingers and pencils leaking onto the floor, gastric howls from unseen radiators, and a teacher's face not flat and faded, not delicately pasteled by a golden late afternoon, but serpentine, gargoyled, Cyclopsed by the inky dark and feeble light from a candle. He/she would understand "everything and nothing," Dad said, if there was nothing discernible in the windows but a lamppost mobbed by blaze-crazy moths and darkness, reticent and nonchalant, as darkness always was.

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.

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.

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

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.

Dad always warned that it was misleading when one imagined people, when one sas them in the Mind's Eye, because one never remembered them as they really were, with as many inconsistencies as there were hairs on a human head (100,000 to 200,000). Instead, the mind used a lazy shorthand, smoothed the person over into their most dominating characteristic
their pessimism or insecurity (something really being lazy, turning them into either Nice or Mean)
and one made the mistake of judging them from this basis alone and risked, on a subsequent encounter, being dangerously surprised.

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.

Landlocked Switzerland: They're Nice and Neutral Only Because They're Tiny

Somewhere in a woman's room there is always something, an object, a detail, that is her, wholly and unapologetic.

I just got another kitten, you know. Found another trademark. It's quite embarrassing I missed it."
"Nine cats? They can send you to prison for that."
He pushed his glasses back on his nose. "I'm calling him Murad, after the cigarettes."
"Never heard of them."
"They're an obsolete Turkish brand, popular in the 1910s and '20s. Murad means 'desire' in Arabic. The only brand that ever appears in a Cordova film is Murad. There's not one Marlboro, Camel, or Virginia Slim. It goes further. If the Murad cigarette is focused upon by the camera in any Cordova film. The very next person who appears on-screen has been devastatingly targeted. In other words, the gods will have drawn a great big X across his shoulder blades and taped an invisible sign there that reads FUCKED. His life will henceforth never be the same.

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.

It was always surprising to me how ferociously the public mourned a beautiful stranger
especially one from a famous family. Into that empty form they could unload the grief and regret of their own lives, be rid of it, feel lucky and light for a few days, comforted by the though, At least it wasn't me.

I began to experience, over the course of the next three months, full-blown insomnia. I'm not talking about the romantic kind, not the sweet sleeplessness one has when one is in love, anxiously awaiting the morn so one can rendezvous with a lover in an illicit gazebo. No, this was the torturous, clammy kind, when one's pillow slowly takes on the properties of a block of wood and one's sheets, the air of the Everglades.

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.

Smoke was a person with a sense of history. Do you know what I mean? ... in truth, I DID know what she meant. Da Vinci, Martin Luther King, Jr., Genghis Kahn, Abraham Lincoln, Bette Davis - if you read their definitive biographies, you learned even when they were a month old, cooing in some wobbly crib in the middle of nowhere, they already had something historic about them. The way other kids had baseball, long division, Hot Wheels, and hula hoops, these kids had History and thus tended to be prone to colds, unpopular, sometimes plagued with a physical deformity (Lord Byron's clubfoot, Maugham's severe stutter, for example), which pushed them into exile in their heads. It was there they began to dream of human anatomy, civil rights, conquering Asia, a lost speech and being (within a span of four years) a jezebel, a marked woman, a little fox and an old maid.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The dark side of life has a way of finding us all anyway, so stop chasing it.

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

Well, everyone and their grandmother knows she's still
banging Charles after all these years - "
"Like a screen in a tornado. Sure.

It was what accidental deaths did to people, made everybody's sea floor irregular and uneven, causing tidal currents to collide, surge upward, thereby resulting in small yet volatile eddies churning at everybody's surface. (In the more dangerous cases, it created a lasting whirlpool in which the strongest swimmers could drown.)

What you tend to find in the personal lives of brilliant men is devastation akin to a nuclear bomb going off.

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.

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.

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.

. . .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.

It's wonderful to get lost in a piece of music, she'd said. To forget your name for a while.

Dad said certain people's sanity, in order to maintain a healthy equilibrium, required getting messy once in a while, what he called "going Chekhovian:" 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.

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

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.

Take as much care with words expressing your sentiments as you will crafting your doctoral dissertation.

(the Boston Tea Party was the work of 1777-era frat boys)

It felt as if we'd been to war together. Deep in a jungle, alone, I had relied on them, these strangers. They'd held me up in ways only people could. When it was over, an ending never felt like an ending, only an exhausted draw, we went our separate ways. Be we were bonded forever by the history of it, the simple fact they'd seen the raw side of me and me of them, a side no one, not even closest friends or family had ever seen before, or probably ever would.

That's what I've always found so pathetic about fans. They weep when they have a live glimpse of you, frame the fork you touched. Yet they're impervious to doing anything with that inspiration, like enriching their own lives. It drove Stanny-boy crazy. He used to say to me, 'Huey' - it was his nickname for me - 'Huey, they see the films five times, write me fan letters, but the underlying meaning is lost on them. They take nothing away. Not heroism. Not courage. It's all just entertainment.

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.

I think I repeated the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in my head at least one thousand times: the mathematical product of the combined uncertainties of concurrent measurements of position and momentum in a specified direction could never be less than Planck's constant, h, divided by 4π. This meant, rather encouragingly, that my uncertain position and zero momentum and the Beast Responsible for the Sound's uncertain position and uncertain momentum had to sort of null each other out, leaving me with what is commonly known in the scientific world as "wide-ranging perplexity.

When she opened up that closet and found you cowering in the corner, what did she do? You're still alive, aren't you? You're still wearing that sacrilegious getup. What did Ashley do that you were so fucking afraid of?'
Villarde only lowered his head.
'You can't even say it, can you?'
Villarde opened his mouth, but no sound came out. Then he gasped, a bizarre gagging sound that prompted disgust to flood through me. He was, without doubt, one of the most wretched beings I'd ever laid eyes on.
'She pulled me to my feet,' he whispered. 'And she ... '
'She what?' shouted Hopper.
'She ... ' Villarde was crying. 'There's really nothing more terrifying -
'WHAT?'
'She told me she ... forgave me.'
The words were so fragile and unexpected, no one spoke.

She was flighty and poor, a French studies major who quoted Simone de Beauvoir. She wiped her runny nose on her coat sleeve when it was snowing, stuck her head out of car windows the way dogs do, the wind fireworking her hair. That woman was gone now. Not that it was her fault. Vast fortunes did that to people. It took them to the cleaners, cruelly starched and steam-pressed them so all their raw edges, all the dirt and hunger and guileless laughter, were ironed out. Few survived real money.

Always live your life with your biography in mind.

The truth about what happens to us in this world keeps changing ... it never stops.

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.

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.

He chose you because a plain setting makes the diamond sparkle brighter.

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.

Battered by shifing currents and a cold, unrelenting wind, we sailed past deserted islands crowded with pines and a ghost tree growing staight out of the water, its gaunt trunk and scrawny branches raised heavenward like an outcast pleading for his life. Now, having reached the north shore, we were doggedly searching for the hidden rivulet that would take us into The Peak. We were trapped in muddy water barbed with grasses and covered with thick green algae, which broke apart in clumps, then, after we'd edged through, resealed, erasing all signs of our passing.

The wind had dissipated - strange, as it'd been so turbulent minutes ago out on the lake. Dense trees surrounded us, packed like hordes of stranded prisoners. There wasn't a single bird, not a scuttle through the branches, not a cry - as if everything alive had fled.

Sometimes people can surprise the hell outta you. Sometimes they can tear your heart out and turn it to putty, can't they?

You want the girl next door? Go next door!

One or two individuals in times of crisis turn into Heroes, a handful into Villains, the rest into Fools.

It's a terrible thing, to lie. It's a field you keep seeding and watering and plowing, but nothing will ever grow on it.

Freak the ferocious out.

In college I studied '60s and '70s radicalism, student activism, forms of political violence, groups like the Weathermen, the Black Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the New Left.

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

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.

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

(Carnations) The only flower that, when given to someone, is marginally superior to dead ones.

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.

The territory between two people who were once soul mates but were no longer was akin to wandering into Pakistan's tribal region.

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.

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It was a fluke. But then, life is.

I remembered what Dad said once, that some people have all of life's answers worked out the day they're born and there's no use trying to teach them anything new. "They're closed for business even though, somewhat confusingly, their doors open at eleven, Monday through Friday," Dad said. And 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. It was like being a Prisoner in a Maximum-Security Prison, wanting to know what a Visitor's hand felt like (see Living in Darkness, Cowell, 1967). No matter how desperately you wanted to know, pressing your dumb palm against the glass right where the visitor's hand was pressed on the opposite side, you never would know that feeling, not until they set you free.

Books give us new lives, loves, and the feeling we aren't alone.

The shelf life of any great love is fifteen years. After that you need a serious preservative, which can seriously harm your health.

Is man's destiny determined by the vicissitudes of environment or free will? I argue that it is free will, because what we think, what we dwell upon in our heads, whether it be fears or dreams, has a direct effect upon the physical world. The more you think about your downfall, your ruin, the greater the likelihood that it will occur. And conversely, the more one thinks of victory, the more likely one will achieve it.

It was as if Hannah had sprung a leak and her character, usually so meticulous and contained, was spilling all over the place.

Is she sad? she asked.
No, honey. She's lived-in.

I haven't always been a writer and I suppose I tiptoed around the idea of writing full time, because it's so isolating.

Sovereign. Deadly. Perfect.

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.

I think I've heard this story before. He died alone?"
"Everyone dies alone.

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

And so fleas look up at the sky and wonder why stars.

If all histories have a period known as The Golden Age, somewhere between
The Beginning and The End, I suppose those Sundays during Fall Semester
at Hannah's were just that, or, to quote one of Dad's treasured
characters of cinema, the illustrious Norma Desmond as she recalled the lost
era of silent film: "We didn't need dialogue. We had faces.

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.

To be sensitive is fine, but it makes day-to-day living- life -rather painful.

Most people ended up, after only a couple of months, far, far away from where they'd intended to go, stuck in some barbed underbrush of a quagmire when they'd meant to head straight to the ocean.

They looked happy, but, of course, that didn't say much. Everyone smiles for a photograph.

Once you slaughter the lamb, you are capable of everything and anything, and the world is yours.

The days shuffled by like bland schoolgirls. I didn't notice their individual faces, only their basic uniform: day and night, day and night.
I had no patience for showers or balanced meals. I did a lot of lying on floors - childish certainly, but when one can lie on floors without anyone seeing one, trust me, one will lie on a floor. I discovered, too, the fleeting yet discernible joy of biting into a Whitman's chocolate and throwing the remaining half behind the sofa in the library. I could read, read, read until my eyes burned and the words floating like noodles in soup.

L'Avventura,' Dad said, 'has the sort of ellipsis ending most American audiences would rather undergo a root canal than be left with, not only because they loathe anything left to the imagination-we're talking about the country that invented spandex-but also because they are a confident, self-assured nation. They know Family. They know Right from Wrong. They know God-many of them attest to daily chats with the man. And the idea that none of us can truly know anything at all-not the lives of our friends or family, not even ourselves-is a thought they'd rather be shot in the arm with their own semi-automatic rifle than face head-on. Personally, I think there's something terrific about not knowing, relinquishing man's feeble attempt to control. When you throw up your hands, say, "Who knows?" you can get on with the sheer gift of being alive.

She was lost now, she'd been silenced- another dead branch on Cordova's warped tree.

The mountains hugged each other sternly, similar to the way men hugged other men, not letting their chests touch. Thin clouds hung around their necks, and the mountains farthest away, the ones passed out against the horizon, were so pale, you couldn't see where their backs ended and the sky began.
The view made me sad, but I suppose everyone, when happening upon a sprawling expanse of earth, all light and mist, all breathlessness and infinity, felt sad - "the enduring gloom of man," Dad called it.

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

Dad's Theory of Arrogance
that everyone always assumes they're the Principal Character of Desire and/or Loathing in everybody else's Broadway Play.

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.

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.

The Shadow is what people are hunting throughout the tale. Or else it can dog the hero, refusing to leave him alone. It's a potent force that bewitches as much as it torments. It can lead to hell or heaven. It's the hollow forever inside you, never filled. It's everything in life you can't touch, hold on to, so ephemeral and painful it makes you gasp. You might even glimpse it for a few seconds before it's gone. Yet the image will live with you. You'll never forget it as long as you live. It's what you're terrified of and paradoxically what you're looking for. We are nothing without our shadows. They give our otherwise pale, blinding world definition. They allow us to see what's right in front of us. Yet they'll haunt us until we're dead.

The notes weren't played," he went on, "They were poured from a Grecian urn.

For every man there exists bait he cannot resist swallowing.

And that fear I'd felt, the disembodying confusion, seemed to be a drug I was now addicted to, because moving through the ordinary world- watching CNN, reading the Times, walking to Sant Ambroeus to have a coffee at the bar- made me feel exhausted, even depressed. Perhaps I was suffering from the same problem as the man who'd sailed around the world and now on land, facing his farmhouse, his wife and kids, understood that the constancy of home stretching out before him like a dry flat field was infinitely more terrifying than any violent squall with thirty-foot swells.

Man's wobbly little mind isn't equipped for hauling around the great unknowns.
Very few people realize, there's no point chasing after answers to life's important questions. They all have fickle, highly whimsical minds of their own.
Nevertheless. If you're patient, if you don't rush them, when they're ready, they'll smash into you. And don't be surprised if afterward you're speechless and there are cartoon Tweety Birds chirping around your head.

A Tornado knocks a house down, killing the owner, and it's a tragedy. Then you learn a serial killer lived there and the same act becomes a miracle. The truth about what happens to us in this world keeps changing. Always. It never stops. Sometimes not even after death.

As far as one journeys, as much as a man sees, from the turrets of the Taj
Mahal to the Siberian wilds, he may eventually come to an unfortunate
conclusion - usually while he's lying in bed, staring at the thatched ceiling of
some substandard accommodation in Indochina," writes Swithin in his last
book, the posthumously published Whereabouts, 1917 (1918). "It is impossible
to rid himself of the relentless, cloying fever commonly known as Home.
After seventy-three years of anguish I have found a cure, however. You must
go home again, grit your teeth and however arduous the exercise, determine,
without embellishment, your exact coordinates at Home, your longitudes
and latitudes. Only then, will you stop looking back and see the spectacular
view in front of you.

It was true. After our divorce, I'd ended up in a slight relationship with my last research assistant, Aurelia Feinstein, age 34-though let me state for the record it was not as hot as it sounded. Making love to Aurelia was like rummaging through a card catalog in a deserted library, searching for one very obscure little red entry on Hungarian poetry. It was dead silent, no one gave me any dierection, and nothing was where it was supposed to be.

Within every elaborate lie, a kernel of truth.

A man so far out of his league he suffered from altitude sickness.

Love? Dopamine released in the brain, which gets depleted over time, leaving contempt.