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5d44c4d
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It felt as if we'd been to war together. Deep in a jungle, alone, I had relied on them, these strangers. They'd held me up in ways only people could. When it was over, an ending never felt like an ending, only an exhausted draw, we went our separate ways. Be we were bonded forever by the history of it, the simple fact they'd seen the raw side of me and me of them, a side no one, not even closest friends or family had ever seen before, or pr..
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Marisha Pessl |
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1daaa60
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People had an illogical, self-serving rationale when it came to interpreting the behavior of others.
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Marisha Pessl |
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63c0fe5
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I remembered what Dad said once, that some people have all of life's answers worked out the day they're born and there's no use trying to teach them anything new. "They're closed for business even though, somewhat confusingly, their doors open at eleven, Monday through Friday," Dad said. And 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 mad..
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Marisha Pessl |
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c75352d
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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.
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Marisha Pessl |
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13bc8d8
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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. Increasing the scale, the depth of content, the universal themes. And I don't care..
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Marisha Pessl |
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fd95f83
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Funnily enough, it is the subject one dreads talking about at length one ends up talking about at length, often without the slightest provocation.
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Marisha Pessl |
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c79ec1c
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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..
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Marisha Pessl |
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46bf4eb
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But when you flee someone, no matter how far you roam, that person will follow you as doggedly as the stars.
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Marisha Pessl |
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9ec904f
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A deus ex machina will never appear in real life so you best make other arrangements.
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literature
fiction
reality
life
plot-device
real-life
plot
plan
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Marisha Pessl |
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589f490
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There was something about her playing... a knowledge of darkness in the most extreme form.
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darkness
music
deadly
piano
horror
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Marisha Pessl |
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adc24ba
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To be next to her was to have everything.
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Marisha Pessl |
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a188d07
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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 - 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..
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Marisha Pessl |
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3519418
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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 comin..
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love
closure
sad
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Marisha Pessl |
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28ec2a3
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No way, man. I got one rule as a driver." "What's that?" "Never look in da rearview mirror." " We drifted into the left-hand lane, cutting off a cab. "It's not healthy to keep a' watchin' what you leavin' behind."
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Marisha Pessl |
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45c6810
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The truth about what happens to us in this world keeps changing ... it never stops.
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Marisha Pessl |
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846086a
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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.)
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Marisha Pessl |
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cf737cc
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Smoke was a person with a sense of history. Do you know what I mean?" ...in truth, I DID know what she meant. Da Vinci, Martin Luther King, Jr., Genghis Kahn, Abraham Lincoln, Bette Davis - if you read their definitive biographies, you learned even when they were a month old, cooing in some wobbly crib in the middle of nowhere, they already had something historic about them. The way other kids had baseball, long division, Hot Wheels, and hu..
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Marisha Pessl |
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47b01bc
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Well, it doesn't look good. Makes me look like one of those unloved latchkey children they make after-school specials about." "Don't sell yourself short. You're more Masterpiece Theatre."
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fathers
masterpiece-theatre
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Marisha Pessl |
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b1e7f94
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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.
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Marisha Pessl |
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79a63b1
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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? Do you want to know what is there or live in the dark delusion that this commercial world insists we remain sealed inside like blind caterpillars in an eternal cocoon? Will you curl up with your eyes closed and die? Or c..
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Marisha Pessl |
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02c64ea
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It's a common feeling for people to feel intermittent antipathy toward individuals they're familiar with.
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Marisha Pessl |
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8250f1a
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Most people ended up, after only a couple of months, far, 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.
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Marisha Pessl |
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20326c6
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There was quantum mechanics, string theory, and then there was the most mind-bending frontier of the natural world, .
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Marisha Pessl |
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2631391
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Sometimes people surprise the hell outta you. Sometimes they can tear your heart out and turn it to putty, can't they?
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Marisha Pessl |
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1ea0dd6
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But it could also be an enslavement, , to keep searching for , keep plunging down, down to the lonely chambers of the sea. . It was a tragic thing to do, like looking for Eden.
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Marisha Pessl |
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6cb05b7
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You want the girl next door? Go next door!
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Marisha Pessl |
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aed04fa
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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-- .
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Marisha Pessl |
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2873532
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We're living longer, we social network alone with our , and our depth of feeling gets shallower. Soon it'll be nothing but a tide pool, then a thimble of water, then a .
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Marisha Pessl |
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ed35e93
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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'..
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good-guy
hero
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Marisha Pessl |
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f07a5d7
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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."
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Marisha Pessl |
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2065b17
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It was at this time I learned that the human mind is a blackened overgrown place. Society tries to mow the lawn and trim back the plants, but every one of us is just days away from a wild jungle. And it's the jungle that interests me.
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Marisha Pessl |
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dac4eb9
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You journalists bulldoze life's mysteries, ignorant of what you're so ruthlessly turning up.
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Marisha Pessl |
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98b1949
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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."
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life
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Marisha Pessl |
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66ef174
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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."
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Marisha Pessl |
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d2bf380
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His characters are ravaged, beaten. They walk through infernos and emerge charred doves.
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Marisha Pessl |
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ed182c5
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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..
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Marisha Pessl |
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dbee1ab
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My films are just stories, but that's all we have, the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves. When you talk to the elderly, men and women at the end of their lives, you see that's what's left behind as the body disintegrates. Our stories. Our children will decide whether or not to keep telling them.
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Marisha Pessl |
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9584f08
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If I learned anything about her it was that she lived with a vehemence most of us never have the courage for." Banks tells me. "But there was something about her that precluded an ordinary existence. In some ways, I'm not surprised she's dead. A job, husband, kids, a beach house? That wasn't her. I can't explain why, except she was more like a force that whipped through life, defying logic, scaring you, even hurting you because she was ever..
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enigmas
human-existence
mystery
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Marisha Pessl |
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d68c050
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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.
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Marisha Pessl |
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3630dce
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All worthwhile tales possess some element of violence.
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Marisha Pessl |
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d8ac917
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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.
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Marisha Pessl |
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ce1a135
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That's what I've always found so pathetic about . They weep when they have a live glimpse of you, frame the fork you touched. Yet they're impervious to anything with that inspiration, like enriching their own lives. It drove Stanny-boy crazy. He used to say to me, ' '--it was his nickname for me--' , they see the films five times, write me fan letters, but the underlying meaning is lost on them. They take nothing away. Not heroism. Not c..
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would-be-literary-inspiration
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Marisha Pessl |
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0797a69
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I saw very little as it truly was. But that was what Martha taught me. We swear we see each other, but all we are ever able to make out is a tiny porthole view of an ocean. We think we remember the past as it was, but our memories are as fantastic and flimsy as dreams. It's so easy to hate the pretty one, worship the genius, love the rock star, trust the good girl. That's never their only story. We are all anthologies. We are each thousands..
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Marisha Pessl |
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2f453d0
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Freak the ferocious out.
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Marisha Pessl |