Marisha Pessl Quotes

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Books Character Dad Feelings Hate Writing

Well, life isn't a cakewalk, is it?! Eighty-nine percent of the world's most valuable art was created by men living in rat-infested flats. You think Velásquez wore Adidas? You think he enjoyed the luxuries of central heating and twenty-four-hour pizza delivery?!

Marisha Pessl

Art, Men, Thinking

Marisha Pessl (2013). “Special Topics in Calamity Physics”, p.432, Penguin UK

48 Copy quote
It's kind of funny...the moments on which life hinges. I think growing up you always imagine your life - your success - depends on your family and how much money they have, where you go to college, what sort of job you can pin down, starting salary...But it doesn't, you know. You wouldn't believe this, but life hinges on a couple of seconds you never see coming. And what you decide in those few seconds determines everything from then on... And you have no idea what you'll do until you're there.

Marisha Pessl

Jobs, Growing Up, Couple

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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

Hate, Long, People

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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

Philosophy, Inspiration, Fighting

Marisha Pessl (2006). “Special Topics in Calamity Physics”, p.333, Penguin

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

Marisha Pessl

Thinking, Rocks, Realizing

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

Marisha Pessl

Dog, Earth, Sun

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Always live your life with your biography in mind," Dad was fond of saying. "Naturally, it won't be published unless you have a Magnificent Reason, but at the very least you will be living grandly.

Marisha Pessl

Dad, Live Your Life, Mind

Marisha Pessl (2006). “Special Topics in Calamity Physics”, p.58, Penguin

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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

Past, Light, Color

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For every man there exists bait he cannot resist swallowing.

Marisha Pessl

Motivational, Men, Bait

Marisha Pessl (2013). “Night Film”, p.463, Random House

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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

Sweet, School, Narrative Structure

Marisha Pessl (2006). “Special Topics in Calamity Physics”, p.83, Penguin

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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

Things In Life, Trying, Scar

Marisha Pessl (2006). “Special Topics in Calamity Physics”, p.199, Penguin

6 Copy quote
Always live your life with your biography in mind.

Marisha Pessl

Book, Beer, Live Your Life

Marisha Pessl (2006). “Special Topics in Calamity Physics”, p.58, Penguin

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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

Spring, Sadness, Swimming

Marisha Pessl (2006). “Special Topics in Calamity Physics”, p.203, Penguin

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

Marisha Pessl

People, Realizing, Life Is

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Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last.

Marisha Pessl

Sweet, Epic, Greek

Marisha Pessl (2006). “Special Topics in Calamity Physics”, p.84, Penguin

4 Copy quote
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

Making Love, Library, Littles

6 Copy quote
It’s hard, in America, not to equate ‘happiness’ with ‘things’.

Marisha Pessl

America, Hard

Marisha Pessl (2006). “Special Topics in Calamity Physics”, p.112, Penguin

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

Marisha Pessl

People, Lasts, Firsts

Marisha Pessl (2006). “Special Topics in Calamity Physics”, p.197, Penguin

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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

Dad, Character, Play

Marisha Pessl (2006). “Special Topics in Calamity Physics”, p.197, Penguin

4 Copy quote
Freak the ferocious out.

Marisha Pessl

Freak

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Within every elaborate lie, a kernel of truth.

Marisha Pessl

Lying, Kernel

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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

Home, Views, World

Marisha Pessl (2006). “Special Topics in Calamity Physics”, p.280, Penguin

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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

Heart, Dark, Strive

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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

Dad, Mistake, Nice

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Most people ended up, after only a couple of months, so far away from where they'd intended to go, stuck in some barbed underbrush of a quagmire when they'd meant to head straight to the ocean.

Marisha Pessl

Couple, Ocean, People

4 Copy quote

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Born: October 26, 1977
Occupation: Writer
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