Marisha Pessl Quotes

47 Sourced Quotes

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
There was quantum mechanics, string theory, and then there was the most mind-bending frontier of the natural world, women.

Marisha Pessl
Always live your life with your biography in mind," Dad was fond of saying. "Naturally, it won't be published unless you have a Magnificent Reason, but at the very least you will be living grandly.

Marisha Pessl
Just when you think you've hit rock bottom, you realize you're standing on another trapdoor.

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

Marisha Pessl
We're living longer, we social network alone with our screens, and our depth of feeling gets shallower. Soon it'll be nothing but a tide pool, then a thimble of water, then a micro drop.

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

Marisha Pessl
His characters are ravaged, beaten. They walk through infernos and emerged charred doves.

Marisha Pessl
Most people ended up, after only a couple of months, so 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.

Marisha Pessl
It was never the act itself but our own understanding of it that defeated us, over and over again.

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

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

Marisha Pessl
People don't realize how easy life is to change. You just get on the bus.

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 funny how the night that changes your life forever starts out like all the others.

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

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

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

Marisha Pessl
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
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
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
It's got to be some kind of cult. Anyone offers you Kool-Aid or a hot shower, say no.

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

Marisha Pessl