Marisha Pessl Quotes
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.
People had an illogical, self-serving rationale when it came to interpreting the behavior of others.
Always live your life with your biography in mind.
It's a common feeling for people to feel intermittent antipathy toward individuals they're familiar with.
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.
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.
There was quantum mechanics, string theory, and then there was the most mind-bending frontier of the natural world, women.
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 -
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.
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.
Some people are as fragile as butterflies and sensitive and it’s your responsibility not to destroy them. Just because you can
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.
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?
I haven't always been a writer and I suppose I tiptoed around the idea of writing full time, because it's so isolating.
It was never the act itself but our own understanding of it that defeated us, over and over again.
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.
But when you flee someone, no matter how far you roam, that person will follow you as doggedly as the stars.
…deep-diving love, a love that excavates you. It’s something you have to have before you die in order to have lived.
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.
What you tend to find in the personal lives of brilliant men is devastation akin to a nuclear bomb going off.
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.
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.
It was as if Hannah had sprung a leak and her character, usually so meticulous and contained, was spilling all over the place.
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.
Justice wields an erratic sword, grants mercy to fortunate few. Yet if man doesn't fight for her, 'tis chaos he's left to.
Funnily enough, it is the subject one dreads talking about at length one ends up talking about at length, often without the slightest provocation.
Sometimes it takes more courage not to let yourself see. Sometimes knowledge is damaging - not enlightenment but enleadenment.
You journalists bulldoze life's mysteries, ignorant of what you're so ruthlessly turning up.
What, really, was the difference between something hounding you and something leading you somewhere?
It's funny how the night that changes your life forever starts out like all the others.
When I'm creating characters, I definitely think of theme songs. Writing for me is very visual, so I sometimes think of it in terms of a movie with a soundtrack, and try to transfer that to words.
...the deepest secrets about ourselves that we, in the ultimate act of humanity, will spare those we truly love.
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.
Just when you think you've hit rock bottom, you realize you're standing on another trapdoor.
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.
Happiness is a hound dog in the sun. We aren't on Earth to be happy, but to experience incredible things. - Hannah Schneider
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.
