Marisha Pessl Quotes

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

“For every man there exists bait he cannot resist swallowing.”

“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.”

“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.”

“It’s what we chase but never find. It is the mystery of our lives, the understanding that even when we have everything we want it is one day to leave us. It’s the something unseen, the lurking devastation, the darkness that gives our lives dimension.”

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

“I hate how the people who reallyyou are the ones you can never hold on to for very long. And the ones who don’t understand youstick around.”

“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.”

“…how monstrous the people you loved could be.”

“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…”

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

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

“It’s easy to be yourself in the dark.”

“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.”

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

“Sovereign. Deadly. Perfect.”

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

“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, for, everything around you.”

“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.”

“… 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.”

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

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

- Hannah Schneider”

“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.”

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

“I was aware too how strange adults were, how theirs lives were vaster than they wanted anyone to realize, that they actually stretched on and on like deserts, dry and desolate, with an unpredictable, shifting sea of dunes.”