|
06023dc
|
Just when you think you've hit rock bottom, you realize you're standing on another trapdoor.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
021d96e
|
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 |
|
425b8c2
|
Always live your life with your biography in mind.
|
|
life
marisha-pessl
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
c8d7d1e
|
I hate how the people who really you are the ones you can never hold on to for very long. And the ones who don't understand you stick around.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
71baf2f
|
It's easy to be yourself in the dark.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
a8a994a
|
People don't realize how easy life is to change. You just get on the bus.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
e4328b3
|
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 |
|
292c5ab
|
Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliche 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.
|
|
stories
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
16a635f
|
Sometimes it takes more courage not to let yourself see. Sometimes knowledge is damaging - not enlightenment but enleadenment.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
b3383ac
|
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 |
|
6622b43
|
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 |
|
9005109
|
Sovereign. Deadly. Perfect.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
722c545
|
Not returning phone calls is the severest form of torture in the civilized world.
|
|
torture
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
a9d71f1
|
She told me her father taught her to live life way beyond the cusp of it, way out in the outer reaches where most people never had the guts to go, where you got hurt. Where there was unimaginable beauty and pain ... 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, each to each. Where there was dan..
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
bf507f5
|
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.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
7ba6b02
|
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... An..
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
222022c
|
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 |
|
b08e9cb
|
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 |
|
b525840
|
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 |
|
edd397b
|
Life had been a suit I'd only put on for special occasions. Most of the time I kept it in the back of my closet, forgetting it was there. We were meant to die when it was barely stitched anymore, when the elbows and knees were stained with grass and mud, shoulder pads uneven from people hugging you all the time, downpours and blistering sun, the fabric faded, buttons gone.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
492fac7
|
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.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
ab17cf3
|
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.
|
|
wuthering-heights
wal-mart
heathcliff
longing
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
e106a1c
|
how monstrous the people you loved could be.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
6048cde
|
Some people are as fragile as butterflies and sensitive and it's your responsibility not to destroy them. Just because you can
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
6c334c6
|
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 |
|
9d9ec3d
|
We are all anthologies. We are each thousands of pages long, filled with fairy tales and poetry, mysteries and tragedy, forgotten stories in the back no one will ever read.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
a8aebd4
|
Man's wobbly little mind isn't equipped for hauling around the great unknowns.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
e84f388
|
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 |
|
bc1aed0
|
Betrayal isn't ridiculous. It's the reason empires fall.
|
|
night-film
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
61e9234
|
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 |
|
8890fa5
|
What you tend to find in the personal lives of brilliant men is devastation akin to a nuclear bomb going off.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
059c0d1
|
Dad on Child-rearing: "There's no education superior to travel. Think of The Motorcycle Diaries, or what Montrose St. Millet wrote in Ages of Exploration: 'To be still is to be stupid. To be stupid is to die.' And so we shall live. Every Betsy sitting next to you in a classroom will only know Maple Street on which sits her boxy white house, inside of which whimper her boxy white parents. After your travels, you'll know Maple Street, sure, b..
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
6f987f5
|
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 arbitrary, without it, we're lost, wholly incapable of separating the Romantic from the Victorian in our sad, bewildering lives...
|
|
life
structure
order
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
be309d9
|
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 |
|
b576605
|
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 |
|
4bfc134
|
For every man there exists bait he cannot resist swallowing.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
cacde77
|
It's hard, in America, not to equate 'happiness' with 'things'.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
df9d9a6
|
the boring relative everyone ignores--no one calls, no one writes--until they need a serious .
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
3415334
|
the deepest secrets about ourselves that we, in the ultimate act of humanity, will spare those we truly love.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
14a1507
|
To be sensitive is fine, but it makes day-to-day living- life -rather painful.
|
|
painful
sensitive
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
bab6d95
|
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 |
|
9d0146e
|
It's funny how the night that changes your life forever starts out like all the others.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
3515549
|
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.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
2bb7d18
|
Within every elaborate lie, a kernel of truth.
|
|
lying
lies
honesty
truth
lie
stories
|
Marisha Pessl |