Marisha Pessl Quotes & Sayings

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

All worthwhile tales possess some element of violence. — Marisha Pessl

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

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

The mountains hugged each other sternly, similar to the way men hugged other men, not letting their chests touch. Thin clouds hung around their necks, and the mountains farthest away, the ones passed out against the horizon, were so pale, you couldn't see where their backs ended and the sky began.
The view made me sad, but I suppose everyone, when happening upon a sprawling expanse of earth, all light and mist, all breathlessness and infinity, felt sad - "the enduring gloom of man," Dad called it. — Marisha Pessl

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

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

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

It's easy to be yourself in the dark. — Marisha Pessl

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

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. — 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

Millions of people walked through their lives numb, dying to feel something, to feel alive. To be chosen by Cordova for a film was an opportunity for just that, not simply for fame and fortune, but to leave their old selves behind like discarded clothes. — Marisha Pessl

Freak the ferocious out. — Marisha Pessl

It is adorable and healthily childlike secretly to believe in fairy tales, but the instant one articulates such viewpoints to other people, one goes from darling to dumbo, from childlike to chillingly out of touch with reality. — 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

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

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

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

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

Dad was a man who, due to his underprivileged background perhaps, never hesitated when it came to the verbs to get or to take. He was always getting something off the ground, his act together, his hands dirty, the show on the road, someone's goat, the message, out more, on with things, lost, laid, away with murder. He was also always taking charge, the bull by the horns, back the night, something in stride, someone to the cleaners, a rain check, an axe to something, Manhattan. — Marisha Pessl

There it is," he'd say reverentially. "The box represents the mysterious threshold between reality and make-believe. [..] 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. And if it were opened, would anything be set free? No. For the impenetrable prison with the impossible lock is your own head. — 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

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

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

Sovereign. Deadly. Perfect. — 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

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

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

It was true. After our divorce, I'd ended up in a slight relationship with my last research assistant, Aurelia Feinstein, age 34-though let me state for the record it was not as hot as it sounded. Making love to Aurelia was like rummaging through a card catalog in a deserted library, searching for one very obscure little red entry on Hungarian poetry. It was dead silent, no one gave me any dierection, and nothing was where it was supposed to be. — 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

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? — Marisha Pessl

My films are just stories, but that's all we have, the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves. When you talk to the elderly, men and women at the end of their lives, you see that's what's left behind as the body disintegrates. Our stories. Our children will decide whether or not to keep telling them. — Marisha Pessl

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

Maybe it was a consequence of reaching the end of the end, finding out the dark, mad, gleaming tale had concluded the only way it could in the real world
with mortal people doing mortal things, a father and daughter, facing their deaths. — Marisha Pessl

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

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

Due to Jade's fortresslike manner, which, like any well-built castle, made access challenging, girls found her existence not only threatening but flat-out wrong. Although Bartelby Athletic Center featured the latest advertising campaign of Ms. Sturd's three member Benevolent Body-Image Club (laminated Vogue and Maxim covers above captions, "You Can't Have Thighs Like This and Still Walk" and "All Airbrushing"), Jade would only have to swan by, munching on a Snickers to reveal a disturbing truth: You could have thighs like that and still walk. She emphasized what few wanted to accept, that some people did win Trivial Pursuit: The Deity Looks Edition, and there wasn't a thing you could do about it, except come to terms with the fact that you'd only played Trivial Pursuit: John Doe Genes and come away with three pie pieces. — Marisha Pessl

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

Oh? Now tell me your gut reaction to the following words. Colonial.
Dellahay. Wood. Patio. Five Pieces. Sun resistant, wind resistant, Judgment
Day resistant. Amazing value at just $299. And consider the Dellahay motto
neatly inscribed on their cute little tags: 'Patio furniture isn't furniture. It's a
state of mind.' " Dad smiled, putting his arm around me as he pushed me
gently toward Garden. "I'll give you ten thousand dollars if you can tell me
what that means. — 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

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

That was women for you
always morphing. One minute they were helpless, needing shelter and English muffins, the next they were ruthlessly bending you to their will like you were a piece of sheet metal. — Marisha Pessl

The days shuffled by like bland schoolgirls. I didn't notice their individual faces, only their basic uniform: day and night, day and night.
I had no patience for showers or balanced meals. I did a lot of lying on floors - childish certainly, but when one can lie on floors without anyone seeing one, trust me, one will lie on a floor. I discovered, too, the fleeting yet discernible joy of biting into a Whitman's chocolate and throwing the remaining half behind the sofa in the library. I could read, read, read until my eyes burned and the words floating like noodles in soup. — Marisha Pessl

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

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

It was cheerful inside, without the aggressive Easy Rider feel of some of the other tattoo parlors in the city, where the handle-jawed thugs wielding the tattoo guns looked like ink was just a side job, their main work, contract killings. — Marisha Pessl

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. — 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

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. — Marisha Pessl

As far as one journeys, as much as a man sees, from the turrets of the Taj
Mahal to the Siberian wilds, he may eventually come to an unfortunate
conclusion - usually while he's lying in bed, staring at the thatched ceiling of
some substandard accommodation in Indochina," writes Swithin in his last
book, the posthumously published Whereabouts, 1917 (1918). "It is impossible
to rid himself of the relentless, cloying fever commonly known as Home.
After seventy-three years of anguish I have found a cure, however. You must
go home again, grit your teeth and however arduous the exercise, determine,
without embellishment, your exact coordinates at Home, your longitudes
and latitudes. Only then, will you stop looking back and see the spectacular
view in front of you. — Marisha Pessl

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

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

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

Suddenly I was a kid in the hall standing outside my locker about to head to Math. But that was how it went sometimes, the English language, when you really needed it, crumbled to clay in your mouth. That's when all the real things were said. — 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

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

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

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

Moe was a triple threat."
"He could sing, dance, and act?"
She shook her head. "He could speak Armenian, saddle break a stallion, and pass for a female in drag. — 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

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

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

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

We were up the whole night just talking, walking the city. You can walk those blocks forever, take a break on the edge of the fountain, eat pizza and snow cones, awed by the human carnival all around you. — 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

We were freshman, taking her film class, and we'd spend hours after school sitting in her classroom talking about any old thing - life, sex, Forrest Gump. — Marisha Pessl

Dad always warned that it was misleading when one imagined people, when one sas them in the Mind's Eye, because one never remembered them as they really were, with as many inconsistencies as there were hairs on a human head (100,000 to 200,000). Instead, the mind used a lazy shorthand, smoothed the person over into their most dominating characteristic
their pessimism or insecurity (something really being lazy, turning them into either Nice or Mean)
and one made the mistake of judging them from this basis alone and risked, on a subsequent encounter, being dangerously surprised. — Marisha Pessl

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

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

With the iPiano, anyone can be an iMozart. Then, you could compose your own iRequiem for your own iFuneral attended by millions of your iFriends who iLoved you. — 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

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

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

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

I believe writers need to be chameleons, or like Meryl Streep, who can play all sorts of characters. A good writer should be able to cross gender lines and people of all social classes. So for me, writing from a male point of view would be a great challenge, that I would look forward to taking on. — 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

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

I think every writer has a book that haunts them, and on some level, every book you write is a reaction to it. 'Lolita' is that book for me. Nabokov's love of wordplay, descriptive detail, artfully complex plots, and his themes of obsession and lost love, are inspiring. — 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

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

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

No wonder so many adults long to return to university, to all those deadlines
ahhh, that structure! Scaffolding to which we may cling! Even if it is arbitrary, without it, we're lost, wholly incapable of separating the Romantic from the Victorian in our sad, bewildering lives ... — 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

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

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

It's one of these juvenile therapy scams," he went on, sprinkling a pinch of the Golden Virginia tobacco along the rolling paper. "They advertise help for your troubled teen by staring at the stars and singing 'Kumbaya'. Instead, it's a bunch of bearded nutjobs left in charge of some of the craziest kids I've ever seen in my life - bulimics, nymphos, cutters trying to saw their wrists with the plastic spoons from lunch. You wouldn't believe the shit that went on." He shook his head. "Most of the kids had been so mentally screwed by their parents they needed more than twelve weeks of wilderness. They needed reincarnation. To die and just come back as a grasshopper, as a fucking weed. That'd be preferable to the agony they were in just by being alive. — Marisha Pessl

You'll find that great artists don't love, live, fuck or even die like ordinary people. Because they always have their art. It nourishes them more than any connection to people. Whatever human tragedy befalls them, they're never too gutted, because they need only to pour the tragedy into their vat, stir in the other lurid ingredients, blast it over a fire. What emerges will be even more magnificent than if the tragedy had never occurred. — Marisha Pessl

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

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