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d9c3069
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Grab the work when it comes, my man. Your competition is now a fourteen-year-old in pajamas with the username Truth-ninja-12 who believes fact-checking a story is reading his subject's Twitter feed. Be afraid.
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Marisha Pessl |
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1a5f72b
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What, really, was the difference between something hounding you and something leading you somewhere?
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Marisha Pessl |
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5a5c20c
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Somewhere in a woman's room there is always something, an object, a detail, that is her, wholly and unapologetic.
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Marisha Pessl |
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816e606
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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.
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Marisha Pessl |
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08ade0e
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And so fleas look up at the sky and wonder .
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Marisha Pessl |
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b9952a8
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It's got to be some kind of cult. Anyone offers you Kool-Aid or a hot shower, say .
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Marisha Pessl |
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fa488cc
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Like that lightning that comes out of the blue when there's not even a storm going on, just a crazy crack in the sky. With something like that right in front of you, you can't help but feel there's new possibilities out there.
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Marisha Pessl |
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5dc4751
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Sadly, American teenagers are to a weightless vacuum as seat cushions are to polyurethane foam -
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Marisha Pessl |
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b1666d7
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Life does not belong to you. It is the apartment you rent. Love without fear, for love is an airplane that carries you to new lands. There is a universe in silence. A tunnel to peace in a scream. Get a good night's sleep. Laugh when you can. You are more magical than you know. Take your advice from the elderly and children. None of it as crucial as you think, but that makes it no less vital. Our lives go on, and on. Look for the breadcrumbs..
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life-lessons
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Marisha Pessl |
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89be0e3
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But you go through with it, continue to fight, because you hope one day it won't be like this. Life can be so cruel. It doles out just enough hope to keep you going, like a small cup of water and one slice of bread to someone on the verge of starvation.
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Marisha Pessl |
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53fc73f
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Do I dare?
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Marisha Pessl |
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755a077
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In the end, a man turns into what he thinks he is, however large or small. It is the reason why certain people are prone to colds and catastrophe. And why others can dance on water.
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Marisha Pessl |
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c5172d3
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Concert pianists get to be quite chummy with dead composers. They can't help it. Classical music isn't just . It's a personal diary. An uncensored confession in the dead of night. A baring of the soul. Take a modern example. Florence and the Machine? In the song 'Cosmic Love,' she catalogs the way in which the world has gone dark, distorting her, when she, a rather intense young woman, was left bereft by a love affair. 'The stars, the moon..
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music
classical-music
cosmic-love
florence-and-the-machine
florence-welch
night-film
love-affair
lyrics
confession
thriller
mystery
diary
horror
suspense
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Marisha Pessl |
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93f14f5
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Such things as anguish, woe, affliction, guilt, feelings of awfulness, and utter wretchedness, the bread and butter of Days of Yore and Russians, sadly have very little staying power in these lickety-split Modern Times.
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Marisha Pessl |
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8f09b7d
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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 bes..
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Marisha Pessl |
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cbcc595
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Whilst man is in one location, he thinks of another. Dancing with one woman, he can't help but long to see the quiet curve of another's nude shoulder; to never be satisfied, to never have the mind and body cheerfully stranded in a single location - this is the curse of the human race!
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Marisha Pessl |
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a68237a
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When men desire each other, they crash together like wrecking balls, quenching their need right then and there, as if the world were about to end.
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Marisha Pessl |
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2cb0e89
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Due to Jade's fortresslike manner, which, like any well-built castle, made access challenging, girls found her existence not only threatening but flat-out wrong. Although Bartelby Athletic Center featured the latest advertising campaign of Ms. Sturd's three member Benevolent Body-Image Club (laminated Vogue and Maxim covers above captions, "You Can't Have Thighs Like This and Still Walk" and "All Airbrushing"), Jade would only have to swan ..
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Marisha Pessl |
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725615d
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This is New York. If people found out worshipping the devil worked, every ambitious type A would be practicing it in their studio apartments.
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Marisha Pessl |
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88d44c2
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It's one of the biggest scandals of life, to learn that the cruelest thing someone could say to you was you were a terrible kisser.
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Marisha Pessl |
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106647c
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Have you the world lately, McGrath? The cruelty, the lack of connection? If you're an artist, I'm sure you can't help but wonder what it's all for. 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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746282f
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They should really tack that on to the marriage ceremony: 'Do you promise to love, honor, obey me, and also to kill me when I can no longer stand in a shower?
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Marisha Pessl |
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d5c0beb
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The days shuffled by like bland schoolgirls. I didn't notice their individual faces, only their basic uniform: day and night, day and night. I had no patience for showers or balanced meals. I did a lot of lying on floors -- childish certainly, but when one can lie on floors without anyone seeing one, trust me, one will lie on a floor. I discovered, too, the fleeting yet discernible joy of biting into a Whitman's chocolate and throwing the r..
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Marisha Pessl |
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a0da770
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It sounds like something out of a night film. Not real life.
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Marisha Pessl |
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62fdb99
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You'll find that great artists don't love, live, fuck or even die like ordinary people. Because they always have their art. It nourishes them more than any connection to people. Whatever human tragedy befalls them, they're never too gutted, because they need only to pour the tragedy into their vat, stir in the other lurid ingredients, blast it over a fire. What emerges will be even more magnificent than if the tragedy had never occurred.
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artists
tragedy
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Marisha Pessl |
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320b0a7
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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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life
assured
frustrating
life-answers
life-s-questions
no-use
teach
father
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Marisha Pessl |
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94986ee
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Could something be real when all evidence of it was gone? Was something categorically true if it lived on only in your head, same as your dreams?
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Marisha Pessl |
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55afc57
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Dad's romances could last anywhere between a platypus egg incubation (19-21 days) and a squirrel pregnancy (24-45 days).
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Marisha Pessl |
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51a19f3
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If all histories have a period known as The Golden Age, somewhere between The Beginning and The End, I suppose those Sundays during Fall Semester at Hannah's were just that, or, to quote one of Dad's treasured characters of cinema, the illustrious Norma Desmond as she recalled the lost era of silent film: "We didn't need dialogue. We had faces."
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Marisha Pessl |
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e91b123
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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. She was always demanding of herself, Do I dare? Do I dare disturb the universe? From Prufrock. Her dad revered the poem, I guess, and the entire family lived in answer to it. They were always reminding themselves to stop measuring ..
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Marisha Pessl |
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efbe14e
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the Boston Tea Party was the work of 1777-era frat boys)
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Marisha Pessl |
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efef80e
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Love? Dopamine released in the brain, which gets depleted over time, leaving contempt.
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Marisha Pessl |
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f57563b
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Everyone has a Cordova story, whether they like it or not.
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Marisha Pessl |
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f735dac
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The shelf life of any great love is fifteen years. After that you need a serious preservative, which can seriously harm your health.
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Marisha Pessl |
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758d544
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Magic was all fun and games until you had the H-bomb of spell materials on the bottom of your shoes.
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night-film
witchcraft
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Marisha Pessl |
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f436abb
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Look around. It's almost gone. If only someone had told me that before. About life. If only I had understood.
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understanding
life
inspirational
life-is-short
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Marisha Pessl |
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69e4745
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So I would die in here. I'd leave my little life. I'd barely worn it out. 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 closest, 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..
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Marisha Pessl |
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c9007b5
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You think you know everything. But you don't. Life and people are right in front of you and you act superior and make jokes but it's just a cover for the fact that you're scared.
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Marisha Pessl |
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a89a997
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All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and when it comes to the Holiday Season, happy families can abruptly become unhappy and unhappy families can, to their great alarm, be happy
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Marisha Pessl |
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07c7c22
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It's one of these juvenile therapy scams," he went on, sprinkling a pinch of the Golden Virginia tobacco along the rolling paper. "They advertise help for your troubled teen by staring at the stars and singing 'Kumbaya'. Instead, it's a bunch of bearded nutjobs left in charge of some of the craziest kids I've ever seen in my life--bulimics, nymphos, cutters trying to saw their wrists with the plastic spoons from lunch. You wouldn't believe ..
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suicide
depression
life
teenagers
mental-health
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Marisha Pessl |
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9f1259c
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It's wonderful to get lost in a piece of music, she'd said. To forget your name for a while.
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Marisha Pessl |
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6181126
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Dad once noted (somewhat morbidly, I thought at the time) that American institutions would be infinitely more successful in facilitating the pursuit of knowledge if they held classes at night, rather than in the daytime, from 8:00 PM to 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning. As I ran through the darkness, I understood what he meant. Frank red brick, sunny classrooms, symmetrical quads and courts--it was a setting that mislead kids to believe that Kno..
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Marisha Pessl |
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94cb1b3
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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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1826da9
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I pretended not to notice, but Dad looked sort of deflated there on the edge of my bed. A lost, even humbled look was wandering around his face (quite surprised to be there). Seeing him like this, so un-Dad, made me feel sorry for him - though I didn't let on. His befuddled expression reminded me of those unflattering photographs of presidents The New York Times and other newspapers adored sticking on their front page in order to show the w..
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Marisha Pessl |