Pessl Quotes & Sayings

She was flighty and poor, a French studies major who quoted Simone de Beauvoir. She wiped her runny nose on her coat sleeve when it was snowing, stuck her head out of car windows the way dogs do, the wind fireworking her hair. That woman was gone now. Not that it was her fault. Vast fortunes did that to people. It took them to the cleaners, cruelly starched and steam-pressed them so all their raw edges, all the dirt and hunger and guileless laughter, were ironed out. Few survived real money. — Marisha Pessl

Maybe she was really good at improv. I couldn't be certain she was nineteen or that her name really was Nora Halliday. Maybe she was like one of those sweaters with an innocent little thread hanging off of it: One pull, the whole thing unraveled. — Marisha Pessl

Man's wobbly little mind isn't equipped for hauling around the great unknowns.
Very few people realize, there's no point chasing after answers to life's important questions. They all have fickle, highly whimsical minds of their own.
Nevertheless. If you're patient, if you don't rush them, when they're ready, they'll smash into you. And don't be surprised if afterward you're speechless and there are cartoon Tweety Birds chirping around your head. — Marisha Pessl

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

Watching a midforties Wonder Woman stumble backward into Hannah's net stack of Traveler magazines made me wonder if the very idea of Growing Up was a sham, the bus out of town you're so busy waiting for, you don't notice it never actually comes. — 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

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

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

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

I'd have to, if on Sunday I wanted to run
off with some "slack-jawed Suzy," some "invertebrate," a "post-pubescent
wasteoid who imagines the Khmer Rouge to be makeup and Guerrilla Warfare
to be that rivalry which occurs between apes. — Marisha Pessl

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

It was the cause of many of Dad's outrages too, when people elected themselves his personal oracle of Delphi ... They'd made the mistake of abridging Dad, putting Dad in a nutshell, telling Dad How It Was (and getting it all wrong).
...
"The act of being personally misconstrued," Dad said, "informed to one's face one is no more complex than a few words haphazardly strung together like blotchy undershirts on a clothesline
well, it can fall the most self-possessed of individuals. — Marisha Pessl

How was it possible scientists were able to locate the edge of the observable universe, the Cosmic Light Horizon ("Our universe is 13.7 billion light years long," wrote Harry Mills Cornblow, Ph.D., with astounding confidence in The ABCs of the Cosmos [2003]), and yet mere human beings stayed so fuzzy, beyond all calculation? — Marisha Pessl

It was always surprising to me how ferociously the public mourned a beautiful stranger
especially one from a famous family. Into that empty form they could unload the grief and regret of their own lives, be rid of it, feel lucky and light for a few days, comforted by the though, At least it wasn't me. — 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

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

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

It was astounding how a woman, when she struck marital gold, procured not just a new wardrobe and new friends but a new voice straight out of a 1930s gramophone (brittle, mono-stereo) and a vocabulary that reliably included laze, season, and terribly sorry. — Marisha Pessl

I hate to think of a day where a compelling book or a compelling authorial voice would be lost simply because that person doesn't have a Web site. But I think that, to use the Internet in a positive way, to turn people on to reading, is something that authors shouldn't really shy away from necessarily. — 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

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

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

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

The late great Horace Lloyd Swithin (1844-1917), British essayist, lecturer, satirist, and social observer, wrote in his autobiographical Appointments, 1890-1901 (1902), When one travels abroad, one doesn't so much discover the hidden Wonders of the World, but the hidden wonders of the individuals with whom one is traveling. They may turn out to afford a stirring view, a rather dull landscape, or a terrain so treacherous one finds it's best to forget the entire affair and return home. — Marisha Pessl

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

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

You think you know everything. But you don't. Life and people are right in front of you and you act superior and make jokes but it's just a cover for the fact that you're scared. — 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

When she opened up that closet and found you cowering in the corner, what did she do? You're still alive, aren't you? You're still wearing that sacrilegious getup. What did Ashley do that you were so fucking afraid of?'
Villarde only lowered his head.
'You can't even say it, can you?'
Villarde opened his mouth, but no sound came out. Then he gasped, a bizarre gagging sound that prompted disgust to flood through me. He was, without doubt, one of the most wretched beings I'd ever laid eyes on.
'She pulled me to my feet,' he whispered. 'And she ... '
'She what?' shouted Hopper.
'She ... ' Villarde was crying. 'There's really nothing more terrifying -
'WHAT?'
'She told me she ... forgave me.'
The words were so fragile and unexpected, no one spoke. — Marisha Pessl

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

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

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

Is there anything more glorious than a professor? Forget about his molding the minds, the future of a nation - a dubious assertion; there's little you can do when they tend to emerge from the womd predestined for Grand Theft Auto Vice City. — Marisha Pessl

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

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

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

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

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

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. — 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

I couldn't help but suspect something he'd seen or encountered had changed his view of what had happened between them. It had somehow set him free. And he'd let it fly, that gorgeous blackbird of a love he'd been keeping in a cage. What was it like for him, every day standing outside in the wind and rain to stare at the ocean, yearning for some sign of her, never giving up hope? At The Peak perhaps she'd finally come into view, a ship coming neither toward him nor away, only riding that perfect line between heaven and earth, long enough for him to know that she had loved him, that what they had was real, before slipping out of sight, probably forever. — 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

Is man's destiny determined by the vicissitudes of environment or free will? I argue that it is free will, because what we think, what we dwell upon in our heads, whether it be fears or dreams, has a direct effect upon the physical world. The more you think about your downfall, your ruin, the greater the likelihood that it will occur. And conversely, the more one thinks of victory, the more likely one will achieve it. — Marisha Pessl

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?' — 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

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

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

How scary and sudden the shift from Living to Dead. — Marisha Pessl

The Shadow is what people are hunting throughout the tale. Or else it can dog the hero, refusing to leave him alone. It's a potent force that bewitches as much as it torments. It can lead to hell or heaven. It's the hollow forever inside you, never filled. It's everything in life you can't touch, hold on to, so ephemeral and painful it makes you gasp. You might even glimpse it for a few seconds before it's gone. Yet the image will live with you. You'll never forget it as long as you live. It's what you're terrified of and paradoxically what you're looking for. We are nothing without our shadows. They give our otherwise pale, blinding world definition. They allow us to see what's right in front of us. Yet they'll haunt us until we're dead. — 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

You want the girl next door? Go next door! — 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

. . .perhaps she figured I was already a highly forgiving person, that I did my best to treat shortcomings like hobos I'd found dozing on my porch: take them in and maybe they'll work for you. — 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

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

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. — Marisha Pessl

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

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

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

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

My mind was spinning from the symmetry of this equation I suddenly faced: magical on one side, scientific on the other, a dark pulsing myth and an acceptable reality ... The explanations were like two sides of the same coin, and the side that I favored revealed something essential about the person I was. Prior to investigating Ashley, with little hesitation I'd have believed the side most others would, the side that was logical, rational, exact. But now, much to my own shock, like a man who suddenly realized he was no longer a person he recognized, that other impossible, illogical, mad side still had a very firm grip on me. — Marisha Pessl

Like that lightning that comes out of the blue when there's not even a storm going on, just a crazy crack in the sky. With something like that right in front of you, you can't help but feel there's new possibilities out there. — Marisha Pessl

But it could also be an enslavement, a hell, to keep searching for the enchanted, keep plunging down, down to the lonely chambers of the sea. To seek mermaids.
It was a tragic thing to do, like looking for Eden. — Marisha Pessl

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. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Somewhere, nearby voices filled with dusk, cabs and panhandlers and one drunken girl screeching like a wounded bird - all of it flushed with a warmth and sad beauty I'd never noticed before. — 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

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

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

Dad always said a person must have a magnificent reason for writing out his or her Life Story and expecting anyone to read it.
Unless your name is something along the lines of Mozart, Matisse, Churchill, Che Guevara or Bond - James Bond - you best spent your free time finger painting or playing shuffeboard, for no one, with the exception of your flabby-armed mother with stiff hair and a mashed potato way of looking at you, will want to hear the particulars of your pitiable existence, which doubtlessly will end as it began - with a wheeze. — 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

The trying to change what they think, the attempt to explain, the hope they'll come to see your side of things, it was exhausting because it never made a dent and afterward you only ached unbearably. — Marisha Pessl

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

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

Because I saw, suddenly, how it would always be for me, Sam's life unfolding like slides in an old projector I'd always be clicking through in the dark, stunning leaps forward in time--but never the uncut reel. — Marisha Pessl

Concert pianists get to be quite chummy with dead composers. They can't help it. Classical music isn't just music. It's a personal diary. An uncensored confession in the dead of night. A baring of the soul. Take a modern example. Florence and the Machine? In the song 'Cosmic Love,' she catalogs the way in which the world has gone dark, distorting her, when she, a rather intense young woman, was left bereft by a love affair. 'The stars, the moon, they have all been blown out. — Marisha Pessl

Secrets - even in hardened criminals, they were just air pockets lodged under debris at the bottom of an ocean. It might take an earthquake, or you scuba diving down there, sifting through the sludge, but their natural proclivity was always to head straight to the surface - to get out. — 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