Marisha Pessl Quotes

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

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

I need to give you one last bit of advice in the off chance this rather extraordinary and enviable situation in which you find yourself is actually true- that somehow you've fallen deep down into a Cordova story. I stared back at him. Be the good guy, he said. How do I know I'm the good guy? He pointed at me, nodding. A very wise question. You don't. Most bad guys think they're good. But there are a few signifiers. You'll be miserable. You'll be hated. You'll fumble around in the dark, alone and confused. You'll have little insight as to the true nature of things, not until the very last minute, and only if you have the stamina and the madness to go to the very, very end. But most importantly- and critically- you will act without regard for yourself. You'll be motivated by something that has nothing to do with the ego. You'll do it for justice. For grace. For love. Those large rather heroic qualities only the good have the strength to carry on their shoulders. And you'll listen. ~ Marisha Pessl

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

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

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

Never try to change the narrative structure of someone else's story, though you will certainly be tempted to, as you watch those poor souls in school, in life, heading unwittingly down dangerous tangents, fatal digressions from which they will unlikely be able to emerge. Resist the temptation. Spend your energies on your story. Reworking it. Making it better. Increasing the scale, the depth of content, the universal themes. And I don't care what those themes are- they're yours to uncover and stand behind-so long as, at the very least, there is courage. ~ Marisha Pessl

For the record, there were no framed pictures of me around our house, and the only class portrait Dad had ever ordered was the one from Sparta Elementary in which I'd sat, knees glued together, in front of a background that looked like Yosemite, sporting pink overalls and a lazy eye. "This is classic," Dad said. "That they shamelessly send me an order form so I can pay $69.95 for prints large and small of a photo in which my daughter looks as if she just suffered a great blow to her head - it just shows you, we are simply strapped to a motorized assembly line moving through this country. We're supposed to pay out, shut up or get tossed in the rejects bin. ~ Marisha Pessl

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

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. ~ Marisha Pessl

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

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

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

Life does not belong to you. It is the apartment you rent. Love without fear, for love is an airplane that carries you to new lands. There is a universe in silence. A tunnel to peace in a scream. Get a good night's sleep. Laugh when you can. You are more magical than you know. Take your advice from the elderly and children. None of it as crucial as you think, but that makes it no less vital. Our lives go on, and on. Look for the breadcrumbs. ~ Marisha Pessl

Show me what a man hates and I'll show you what he is. ~ Marisha Pessl

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

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

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

Freak the ferocious out. ~ Marisha Pessl

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

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

Always live your life with your biography in mind. ~ Marisha Pessl

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

Connie Madison Parker, age 36, on Merchandise: You got to put your
goods on display, babe. Otherwise, not only will the boys ignore you but - an'
trust me on this, my sister's flat as you - we're talkin' the Great Plains of East Texas - no landmarks - one day you'll look down and have no wares at all.
What'll you do then? ~ Marisha Pessl

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. ~ Marisha Pessl

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

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. ~ Marisha Pessl

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

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. ~ Marisha Pessl

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

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. ~ Marisha Pessl

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

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

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

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

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

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. ~ Marisha Pessl

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. ~ Marisha Pessl

For every man there exists bait he cannot resist swallowing. ~ Marisha Pessl

[Adapted and condensed Valedictorian speech:]

I'm going to ask that you seriously consider modeling your life, not in the manner of the Dalai Lama or Jesus - though I'm sure they're helpful - but something a bit more hands-on, Carassius auratus auratus, commonly known as the domestic goldfish. People make fun of the goldfish. People don't think twice about swallowing it. Jonas Ornata III, Princeton class of '42, appears in the Guinness Book of World Records for swallowing the greatest number of goldfish in a fifteen-minute interval, a cruel total of thirty-nine. In his defense, though, I don't think Jonas understood the glory of the goldfish, that they have magnificent lessons to teach us. If you live like a goldfish, you can survive the harshest, most thwarting of circumstances. You can live through hardships that make your cohorts - the guppy, the neon tetra - go belly-up at the first sign of trouble. There was an infamous incident described in a journal published by the Goldfish Society of America - a sadistic five-year-old girl threw hers to the carpet, stepped on it, not once but twice - luckily she'd done it on a shag carpet and thus her heel didn't quite come down fully on the fish. After thirty harrowing seconds she tossed it back into its tank. It went on to live another forty-seven years. They can live in ice-covered ponds in the dead of winter. Bowls that haven't seen soap in a year. And they don't die from neglect, not immediately. They hold on for thre ~ Marisha Pessl

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

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

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

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

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

The deepest secrets about ourselves that we, in the ultimate act of humanity, will spare those we truly love. ~ Marisha Pessl

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. ~ Marisha Pessl

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

You want the girl next door? Go next door! ~ Marisha Pessl

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. ~ Marisha Pessl

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

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

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. ~ Marisha Pessl

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

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. ~ Marisha Pessl

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. ~ Marisha Pessl

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

Mr. Archer being EARTH FRIENDLY was APPARATUS HOSTILE. ~ Marisha Pessl

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

She looked at me as if I were a snag in tights. ~ Marisha Pessl

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

But that was how it went sometimes, the English language, when you really needed it, crumbled to clay in your mouth. ~ Marisha Pessl

It was a fluke. But then, life is. ~ Marisha Pessl

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

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

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. ~ Marisha Pessl

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. ~ Marisha Pessl

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

Sovereign. Deadly. Perfect. ~ Marisha Pessl

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.) ~ Marisha Pessl

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

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

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. ~ Marisha Pessl

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

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

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. ~ Marisha Pessl

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

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

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

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

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

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

But most critically, sweet, never try to change the narrative structure of someone else's story, though you will certainly be tempted to, as you watch those poor souls in school, in life, heading unwittingly down dangerous tangents, fatal digressions from which they will unlikely be able to emerge. Resist the temptation. Spend your energies on your story. Reworking it. Making it better. ~ Marisha Pessl

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

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

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

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

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

Love is this elusive bird," he said. "You're the lifelong bird-watcher, looking for this rare red-plumed quail people spend entire lives trying to see for three seconds in a cherry tree on a mountaintop in Japan."

"You're mistaking love for perfection," I said. "Real love when it's there? It's just there. It's a metal folding chair. ~ Marisha Pessl

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

Fuck you," she said, giggling. "And your little dog too. ~ Marisha Pessl

Dad on Child-rearing: "There's no education superior to travel. Think of The Motorcycle Diaries, or what Montrose St. Millet wrote in Ages of Exploration: 'To be still is to be stupid. To be stupid is to die.' And so we shall live. Every Betsy sitting next to you in a classroom will only know Maple Street on which sits her boxy white house, inside of which whimper her boxy white parents. After your travels, you'll know Maple Street, sure, but also wilderness and ruins, carnivals and the moon. You'll know the man sitting on an apple crate outside a gas station in Cheerless, Texas, who lost his legs in Vietnam, the woman in the tollboth outside Dismal, Delaware, in possession of six children, a husband with black lung but no teeth. When a teacher asks the class to interpret Paradise Lost, no one will be able to grab your coattails, sweet, for you will be flying far, far out in front of them all. For them, you will be a speck somewhere above the horizon. And thus, when you're ultimately set loose upon the world..." He shrugged, his smile lazy as an old dog. "I suspect you'll have no choice but to go down in history. ~ Marisha Pessl

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. ~ Marisha Pessl

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

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. ~ Marisha Pessl

Look around. It's almost gone.
If only someone had told me that before. About life. If only I had understood. ~ Marisha Pessl

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. ~ Marisha Pessl

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. ~ Marisha Pessl

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

Everyone smiles for a photograph. ~ Marisha Pessl