Marisha Pessl quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Marisha Pessl

Marisha Pessl Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Marisha Pessl on Wise Famous Quotes.

I love to put my characters in the dark, it's only then that I can see exactly who they are

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

God, the boring relative everyone ignores - no one calls, no one writes - until they need a serious favor.

Because he was an asshole. I'm not sayin' nothin' I wouldn't say to his face. He embraced his assholeness.

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

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.

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

We aren't on Earth to be happy, but to experience incredible things.

You want the girl next door? Go next door!

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

For every man there exists bait he cannot resist swallowing.

Time leeches most horror and pain from our memories.

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

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

Some people are as fragile as butterflies and sensitive and it's your responsibility not to destroy them. Just because you can

I actually felt awed by the remote possibilities of the person you liked ever liking you back a corresponding amount.

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

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

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

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

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

Everyone has a Cordova story, whether they like it or not.

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 ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be next to her was to have everything.

... deep-diving love, a love that excavates you. It's something you have to have before you die in order to have lived.

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

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

It was a fluke. But then, life is.

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

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

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

Always live your life with your biography in mind.

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.

Sovereign. Deadly. Perfect.

When men desire each other, they crash together like wrecking balls, quenching their need right then and there, as if the world were about to end.

His characters are ravaged, beaten. They walk through infernos and emerge charred doves.

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

It's easy to be yourself in the dark.

A wife sets the ambience of a man's life.

It sounds like something out of a night film. Not real life.

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

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

This is New York. If people found out worshipping the devil actually worked, every ambitious type A would be practicing it in their studio apartments.

Justice wields an erratic sword, grants mercy to fortunate few. Yet if man doesn't fight for her, 'tis chaos he's left to.

We are under an invincible blindness as to the real and true nature of things

Dad's romances could last anywhere between a platypus egg incubation (19-21 days) and a squirrel pregnancy (24-45 days).

Everyone smiles for a photograph.

When your child is seized by an idea with the zeal of a fundamentalist Bible salesman from Indiana, stand in his or her way at your own risk.

The bad things that happen to you don't have to mean anything at all.

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

Magic was all fun and games until you had the H-bomb of spell materials on the bottom of your shoes.

A deus ex machina will never appear in real life so you best make other arrangements.

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

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

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

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

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

There was something about her playing ... a knowledge of darkness in the most extreme form.

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

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

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

All worthwhile tales possess some element of violence.

I'm not afraid of total failure. In the end, we're all just food for worms, so what are we so worried about?

Could something be real when all evidence of it was gone? Was something categorically true if it lived on only in your head, same as your dreams?

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

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

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

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

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

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

How scary and sudden the shift from Living to Dead.

Mr. Archer being EARTH FRIENDLY was APPARATUS HOSTILE.

Freak the ferocious out.

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

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

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

There might be a Starbucks on every corner and an iPhone at every ear, but don't worry, people are still fucking crazy.

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

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

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

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.

Within every elaborate lie, a kernel of truth.

I looked like I wasn't at a cocktail party but an airport, waiting for my life to take off.
Infinitely delayed.

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

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

The million-dollar marital Band-Aid, never a wise idea.

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

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

They're weak, petty, so apathetic about this gift of life as if it were all a mere Pepsi commercial.

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.