Explore Quotes by Marisha Pessl

Always live your life with your biography in mind.

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.

Funnily enough, it is the subject one dreads talking about at length one ends up talking about at length, often without the slightest provocation.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché 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.

...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.

It’s hard, in America, not to equate ‘happiness’ with ‘things’.

Sometimes it takes more courage not to let yourself see. Sometimes knowledge is damaging - not enlightenment but enleadenment. If one recognizes the difference and prepares oneself - it is extraordinarily brave. Because when it comes to certain human miseries, the only witnesses should be the pavement and maybe the trees. (Gareth van Meer)

Man's wobbly little mind isn't equipped for hauling around the great unknowns. Very few people realize, there's no point chasing after answers to life's important questions. They all have fickle, highly whimsical minds of their own. Nevertheless. If you're patient, if you don't rush them, when they're ready, they'll smash into you. And don't be surprised if afterward you're speechless and there are cartoon Tweety Birds chirping around your head. (Gareth van Meer)

Happiness is a hound dog in the sun. We aren't on Earth to be happy, but to experience incredible things. - Hannah Schneider

Sadly, American teenagers are to a weightless vacuum as seat cushions are to polyurethane foam -

Well, life isn't a cakewalk, is it?! Eighty-nine percent of the world's most valuable art was created by men living in rat-infested flats. You think Velásquez wore Adidas? You think he enjoyed the luxuries of central heating and twenty-four-hour pizza delivery?!