Marisha Pessl citations

“Just when you think you've hit rock bottom, you realize you're standing on another trapdoor.”

“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?”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”