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868d810
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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. Increasing the scale, the depth of content, the univer..
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Marisha Pessl |
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88d632c
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The bad things that happen to you don't have to mean anything at all.
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Marisha Pessl |
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280c6fa
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One of my pet peeves was when an adult imagined they had to encapsulate Life for you, hand you Life in a jar, in an eyedropper, in a penguin paperweight full of snow-A Collector's Dream.
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life-lessons
life
patronizing
pet-peeves
teenagers
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Marisha Pessl |
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9a7b9bc
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I actually felt awed by the remote possibilities of the person liked ever liking you back a corresponding amount.
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relationships
fiction
romance
the-odds
marisha-pessl
possibilities
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Marisha Pessl |
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4302a25
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The body shuts down when it's too sad," said my dad."
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Marisha Pessl |
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25d5c49
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I'd actually questioned my sanity, wondered if this was it: the substandard past few years had finally led to a mental break with reality, and now, floodgates open, there'd be no limit to the fiends I'd encounter. They'd simply crawl out of my head, down into the world.
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sanity
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Marisha Pessl |
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c726e13
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When he talked about a Higher Power, he used words like , and . It was something that "got you through the tough times," which "any young person could manage with a little hard work, trust and tenacity." God was a trip to Cancun."
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Marisha Pessl |
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3ddd9be
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they're weak, petty, so apathetic about this gift of life as if it were all a mere Pepsi commercial.
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Marisha Pessl |
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e7bc00d
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Today dies a crooked and gluttonus man' - it was true, at least literally; McCullough allegedly weighed three hundred pounds and suffered from scoliosis.
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Marisha Pessl |
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ec90339
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I don't . Religion? Humans desperate to take out infinity insurance. Death? The great big . Love? Dopamine released in the brain, which gets depleted over time, leaving contempt.
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death
religion
love
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Marisha Pessl |
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dd2ecb5
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Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.'
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Marisha Pessl |
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1a4838d
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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, for, everything around you. And if it were opened, would anything be set free? For the impenetrable prison with the impossible lock is your own head.
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Marisha Pessl |
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56198e3
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He chose you because a plain setting makes the diamond sparkle brighter.
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Marisha Pessl |
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cc85914
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Women of Manhattan, magnificent as they were, they forgot sometimes they weren't immortal. They could throw themselves like confetti into a fun-filled Friday night, with no thought as to what they fell into by Saturday.
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women
nyc
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Marisha Pessl |
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6a17f54
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Time leeches most horror and pain from our memories.
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Marisha Pessl |
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dc4e4df
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the territory between two people who were once soul mates but were no longer was akin to wandering into Pakistan's tribal region.
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Marisha Pessl |
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aec916d
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The dark side of life has a way of finding us all anyway, so stop chasing it.
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Marisha Pessl |
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58d4a20
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They saw me. Milton's smile curled off his face like unsticky tape. And I knew immediately, I was a boy band, a boondoggle, born fool. He was going to pull a Danny Zuko in when Sandy says hello to him in front of the T-Birds, a Mrs. Robinson when she tells Elaine she didn't seduce Benjamin, a Daisy when she chooses Tom with the disposition of a sour kiwi over Gatsby, a self-made man, a man engorged with dreams, who didn't mind throwing a ..
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daisy-buchanan
jay-gatsby
rude-awakening
the-graduate
tom-buchanan
grease
the-great-gatsby
pop-culture
nervous
rude
cruelty
denial
embarrassment
movies
teenagers
rejection
disappointment
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Marisha Pessl |
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1ae5acd
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I thus concluded, with the same awe of Jane Goodall discovering the chimpanzees' nimble use of tools to extract termites, it really wasn't so much the tragic event itself, but others having knowledge of it that prevented recovery.
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Marisha Pessl |
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74bbe0c
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I think I repeated the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in my head at least one thousand times: the mathematical product of the combined uncertainties of concurrent measurements of position and momentum in a specified direction could never be less than Planck's constant, h, divided by 4p. This meant, rather encouragingly, that my uncertain position and zero momentum and the Beast Responsible for the Sound's uncertain position and uncertain ..
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Marisha Pessl |
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07b80e9
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Mr. Archer being EARTH FRIENDLY was APPARATUS HOSTILE.
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Marisha Pessl |
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102b765
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' Dad said, 'has the sort of ellipsis ending most American audiences would rather undergo a root canal than be left with, not only because they loathe anything left to the imagination-we're talking about the country that invented spandex-but also because they are a confident, self-assured nation. They Family. They Right from Wrong. They know God-many of them attest to daily chats with the man. And the idea that none of us can truly know..
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america
family
god
ambiguous-ending
foreign-film
ambiguity
endings
control
americans
right-and-wrong
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Marisha Pessl |
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796b552
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I looked like I wasn't at a cocktail party but an airport, waiting for my life to take off. Infinitely delayed.
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Marisha Pessl |
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2fbc633
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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, but our memories are as fantastic and flimsy as dreams. It's so easy to hate the pretty one, worship the genius, love the rockstar, trust the good girl. That's never their only story.
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marisha-pessl
neverworld-wake
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Marisha Pessl |
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b78e799
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America's greatest revelation was not the atom bomb, not Fundamentalism, not fat farms, not Elvis, not even the quite astute observation that gentlemen prefer blondes, but the great heights to which she has propelled ice cream.
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Marisha Pessl |
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2ee86f5
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America's greatest revelation was not the atom bomb, not Fundamentalism, not fat farms, not Elvis, not even the quite astute observation that gentlemen prefer blondes, but the great heights to which she has propelled ice cream, " Dad was fond of commenting while standing with the freezer door open and inspecting every flavor of Ben and Jerry's, oblivious to the customers swarming around him, waiting for him to move."
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Marisha Pessl |
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4d725ca
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As far as one journeys, as much as a man sees, from the turrets of the Taj Mahal to the Siberian wilds, he may eventually come to an unfortunate conclusion --usually while he's lying in bed, staring at the thatched ceiling of some substandard accommodation in Indochina," writes Swithin in his last book, the posthumously published Whereabouts, 1917 (1918). "It is impossible to rid himself of the relentless, cloying fever commonly known as Ho..
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Marisha Pessl |
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cba42de
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Those were the best nights of my life. I couldn't say why, exactly, this was so--only that I knew that as an old woman, when I thought back to my youth, I'd remember these nights, sitting with these five people along the harrowing window ledge of the Foreman's Lookout, gazing into that clear blue lake hundreds of feet below. Our friendship was born there. There we were bound together. Something about seeing each other against that spare, al..
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Marisha Pessl |
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01fc31e
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It was astounding how a woman, when she struck marital gold, procured not just a new wardrobe and new friends but a new voice straight out of a 1930s gramophone (brittle, mono-stereo) and a vocabulary that reliably included laze, season, and terribly sorry.
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Marisha Pessl |
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bb8e112
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You know what Confucius said?" "Remind me." " 'Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.' "
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Marisha Pessl |
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da21ec7
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Love is this elusive bird," he said. "You're the lifelong bird-watcher, looking for this rare red-plumed quail people spend entire lives trying to see for three seconds in a cherry tree on a mountaintop in Japan." "You're mistaking love for perfection," I said. "Real love when it's there? It's just there. It's a metal folding chair."
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Marisha Pessl |
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23e57a2
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A Tornado knocks a house down, killing the owner, and it's a tragedy. Then you learn a serial killer lived there and the same act becomes a miracle. The truth about what happens to us in this world keeps changing. Always. It never stops. Sometimes not even after death.
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Marisha Pessl |
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20f223a
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We aren't on Earth to be happy, but to experience incredible things.
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Marisha Pessl |
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407a066
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How scary and sudden the shift from Living to Dead.
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fiction
living
death
transition
shift
scary
sudden
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Marisha Pessl |
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2f2dcc7
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It was the cause of many of Dad's outrages too, when people elected themselves his personal oracle of Delphi... They'd made the mistake of abridging Dad, putting Dad in a nutshell, telling Dad How It Was (and getting it all wrong). ... "The act of being personally misconstrued," Dad said, "informed to one's face one is no more complex than a few words haphazardly strung together like blotchy undershirts on a clothesline-- well, it can fall ..
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Marisha Pessl |
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6a0de64
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They looked happy, but, of course, that didn't say much.
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Marisha Pessl |
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26c630e
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The mountains hugged each other sternly, similar to the way men hugged other men, not letting their chests touch. Thin clouds hung around their necks, and the mountains farthest away, the ones passed out against the horizon, were so pale, you couldn't see where their backs ended and the sky began. The view made me sad, but I suppose everyone, when happening upon a sprawling expanse of earth, all light and mist, all breathlessness and infini..
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Marisha Pessl |
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f970f30
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Carnations) The only flower that, when given to someone, is marginally superior to dead ones.
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Marisha Pessl |
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7e81c73
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She was inches from my face, really , as if it were a section of a globe she'd never closely inspected before, an ocean filled with strings of unnamed islands.
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Marisha Pessl |
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0621208
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We were freshman, taking her film class, and we'd spend hours after school sitting in her classroom talking about any old thing--life, sex, Forrest Gump.
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Marisha Pessl |
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6a26688
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Is man's destiny determined by the vicissitudes of environment or free will? I argue that it is free will, because what we think, what we dwell upon in our heads, whether it be fears or dreams, has a direct effect upon the physical world. The more you think about your downfall, your ruin, the greater the likelihood that it will occur. And conversely, the more one thinks of victory, the more likely one will achieve it.
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Marisha Pessl |
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78a2722
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No matter what time of day or amount of work to be done, someone with Tahiti could close his eyes and the reality of moody lawnmowers, scruffy lawns, threats of termination of employment would recede and in seconds he'd simply be in Tahiti, stark naked and drinking from a coconut, aware only of the percussion of the wind and girlish sighs of the ocean. (Few
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Marisha Pessl |
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88f4e2b
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It was always surprising to me how ferociously the public mourned a beautiful stranger -- especially one from a famous family. Into that empty form they could unload the grief and regret of their own lives, be rid of it, feel lucky and light for a few days, comforted by the though, At least it wasn't me.
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Marisha Pessl |
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818ecba
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She was lost now, she'd been silenced- another dead branch on Cordova's warped tree.
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metaphor
nature
death
horror
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Marisha Pessl |