|
0d61f49
|
I'd have to, if on Sunday I wanted to run off with some "slack-jawed Suzy," some "invertebrate," a "post-pubescent wasteoid who imagines the Khmer Rouge to be makeup and Guerrilla Warfare to be that rivalry which occurs between apes."
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
2b064b7
|
Fuck you," she said, giggling. "And your little dog too."
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
328f6a0
|
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 |
|
884558d
|
Que sont les fantasmes ? Des reves dont nous nous servons pour nous preserver de la realite. Notre monde est un plancher rigide qui nous casse le dos si on dort a meme le sol.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
e1c4614
|
How was it possible scientists were able to locate the edge of the observable universe, the Cosmic Light Horizon ("Our universe is 13.7 billion light years long," wrote Harry Mills Cornblow, Ph.D., with astounding confidence in The ABCs of the Cosmos [2003]), and yet mere human beings stayed so fuzzy, beyond all calculation?"
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
193787f
|
somewhere, nearby voices filled with dusk, cabs and panhandlers and one drunken girl screeching like a wounded bird - all of it flushed with a warmth and sad beauty I'd never noticed before.
|
|
sad-beauty
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
88d0108
|
Always life your life with your biography in mind. Naturally, it won't be published unless you have a magnificent reason, but at the very least you'll be living grandly.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
e1a01f5
|
We are under an invincible blindness as to the real and true nature of things
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
f2c1a73
|
It is adorable and healthily childlike secretly to believe in fairy tales, but the instant one articulates such viewpoints to other people, one goes from darling to dumbo, from childlike to chillingly out of touch with reality.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
e31cfdb
|
Take as much care with words expressing your sentiments as you will crafting your doctoral dissertation.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
ed30f3a
|
For the record, there were no framed pictures of me around our house, and the only class portrait Dad had ever ordered was the one from Sparta Elementary in which I'd sat, knees glued together, in front of a background that looked like Yosemite, sporting pink overalls and a lazy eye. "This is classic," Dad said. "That they shamelessly send me an order form so I can pay $69.95 for prints large and small of a photo in which my daughter looks ..
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
756568e
|
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..
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
b33be9d
|
Some stories you should run from while you still have legs.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
2de6115
|
Because he was an asshole. I'm not sayin' nothin' I wouldn't say to his face. He embraced his assholeness.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
1326564
|
I was a ticking clock in a timeless world
|
|
timeless-clock
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
4bb8e30
|
Well, everyone and their grandmother knows she's still banging Charles after all these years --" "Like a screen in a tornado. Sure."
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
ffc5ee3
|
When she opened up that closet and found you cowering in the corner, what did she do? You're still alive, aren't you? You're still wearing that sacrilegious getup. What did Ashley do that you were so fucking afraid of?' Villarde only lowered his head. 'You can't even say it, can you?' Villarde opened his mouth, but no sound came out. Then he gasped, a bizarre gagging sound that prompted disgust to flood through me. He was, without doubt, on..
|
|
you-never-can-tell
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
762b698
|
The store was empty, without a single customer or employee. It appeared in the Internet age, pianos, like physical books, were fast becoming culturally extinct. They'd probably stay that way unless Apple invented the iPiano, which fit inside your pocket and could be mastered via text message. With the iPiano, anyone can be an iMozart. Then, you could compose your own iRequiem for your own iFuneral attended by millions of your iFriends who i..
|
|
ipiano
marish-pessl
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
3762cd8
|
It was never the act itself but our own understanding of it that defeated us, over and over again.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
872a62e
|
Oh? Now tell me your gut reaction to the following words. Colonial. Dellahay. Wood. Patio. Five Pieces. Sun resistant, wind resistant, Judgment Day resistant. Amazing value at just $299. And consider the Dellahay motto neatly inscribed on their cute little tags: 'Patio furniture isn't furniture. It's a state of mind.' " Dad smiled, putting his arm around me as he pushed me gently toward Garden. "I'll give you ten thousand dollars if you can..
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
3a386c9
|
A man so far out of his league he suffered from altitude sickness.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
f6211c0
|
It's a terrible thing, to lie. It's a field you keep seeding and watering and plowing, but nothing will ever grow on it.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
ce36252
|
My mind was spinning from the symmetry of this equation I suddenly faced: magical on one side, scientific on the other, a dark pulsing myth and an acceptable reality.... The explanations were like two sides of the same coin, and the side that I favored revealed something essential about the person I was. Prior to investigating Ashley, with little hesitation I'd have believed the side most others would, the side that was logical, rational, e..
|
|
truth
two-sides
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
15f147c
|
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 made a dent and afterward you only ached unbearably.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
23c5a62
|
Connie Madison Parker, age 36, on Merchandise: "You got to put your goods on display, babe. Otherwise, not only will the boys ignore you but--an' trust me on this, my sister's flat as you--we're talkin' the Great Plains of East Texas -- no landmarks -- one day you'll look down and have no wares at all. What'll you do then?"
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
b0742ec
|
she was flighty and poor, a French studies major who quoted Simone de Beauvoir. She wiped her runny nose on her coat sleeve when it was snowing, stuck her head out of car windows the way dogs do, the wind fireworking her hair. That woman was gone now. Not that it was her fault. Vast fortunes did that to people. It took them to the cleaners, cruelly starched and steam-pressed them so all their raw edges, all the dirt and hunger and guileless..
|
|
money
wealth
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
77b66db
|
And that fear I'd felt, the disembodying confusion, seemed to be a drug I was now addicted to, because moving through the ordinary world- watching CNN, reading the Times, walking to Sant Ambroeus to have a coffee at the bar- made me feel exhausted, even depressed. Perhaps I was suffering from the same problem as the man who'd sailed around the world and now on land, facing his farmhouse, his wife and kids, understood that the constancy of h..
|
|
fear
life
settling
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
59bff16
|
Grab what you can and fight your way to a lifeboat.' Everyone associated with the slow printed word is fast becoming the Great Crested Newt of the culture. First it was the poets, the playwrights, then the novelists. Veteran newspapermen are next.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
b9f8bce
|
Astrid taught me some of the words. I've never forgotten them. One was 'terulya.' It meant 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 |
|
beebe24
|
I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until I became that person. Or he became me.' In the end, a man turns into what he thinks he is, however large or small.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
80bed4c
|
It was a fluke. But then, life is.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
8aa500e
|
perhaps she figured I was already a highly forgiving person, that I did my best to treat shortcomings like hobos I'd found dozing on my porch: take them in and maybe they'll work for you.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
b03dc22
|
It was cheerful inside, without the aggressive Easy Rider feel of some of the other tattoo parlors in the city, where the handle-jawed thugs wielding the tattoo guns looked like ink was just a side job, their main work, contract killings.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
5db63d7
|
We're living longer, we social network alone with our screens, and our depth of feeling gets shallower.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
55330fb
|
We were up the whole night just talking, walking the city. You can walk those blocks forever, take a break on the edge of the fountain, eat pizza and snow cones, awed by the human carnival all around you.
|
|
night-film
new-york-city
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
3aecd6d
|
I just got another kitten, you know. Found another trademark. It's quite embarrassing I missed it." " They can send you to prison for that." He pushed his glasses back on his nose. "I'm calling him Murad, after the cigarettes." "Never heard of them." "They're an obsolete Turkish brand, popular in the 1910s and '20s. means 'desire' in Arabic. The brand that ever appears in a Cordova film is . There's not one Marlboro, Camel, or Virgini..
|
|
crazy-old-man
conspiracy-theories
film
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
cb62dfd
|
Is she sad? she asked. No, honey. She's lived-in.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
9a0e528
|
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. The most we can do is hold out our hands and help each other across the unknown. For in our held hands we find pathways through the dark, across jungles and cities; bridges suspended over the deepest caverns of this world. Your friends will walk with you, holding on wit..
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
775f635
|
Millions of people walked through their lives numb, dying to feel something, to feel alive. To be chosen by Cordova for a film was an opportunity for just that, not simply for fame and fortune, but to leave their old selves behind like discarded clothes.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
23c58fe
|
Maybe it was a consequence of reaching the end of the end, finding out the dark, mad, gleaming tale had concluded the only way it could in the real world--with mortal people doing mortal things, a father and daughter, facing their deaths.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
7f292e5
|
What I mean is, a professor is the only person on earth with the power to put a veritable frame around life-- not the whole thing, God no-- simply a fragment of it, a small wedge. He organizes the unorganizable. Nimbly partitions it into modern and postmodern, renaissance, baroque, primitivism, imperialism and so on. Splice that up with Research Papers, Vacation, Midterms. All that order-- simply divine. The symmetry of a semester course. C..
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
997854f
|
Wir sind alle Anthologien. Wir sind Tausende von Seiten lang, voller Marchen und Poesie, Geheimnisse und Tragodien und vergessener Geschichten ganz am Ende, die nie jemand lesen wird.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
7605347
|
It's a terrible thing, to lie. It's a field you keep seeding and watering and plowing, but nothing will ever grow on it." She" --
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |
|
53aa442
|
I took a step inside to get a better look and realized the man was actually Christ, the way he appeared in Sunday-school classrooms: milky complexion, starched blue dressing gown, a beard trimmed as painstakingly as a bonsai tree. He was doing what he was always doing: cupping blinding light in his hands like he was trying to warm up after a long day of downhill skiing.
|
|
|
Marisha Pessl |