Marisha Pessl Quotes

47 Sourced Quotes

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

Marisha Pessl
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
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.

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

Marisha Pessl
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.

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
But when you flee someone, no matter how far you roam, that person will follow you as doggedly as the stars.

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

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
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
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
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
Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last.

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
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