Marisha Pessl > Quotes

“Just when you think you've hit rock bottom, you realize you're standing on another trapdoor.”
― Marisha Pessl, Night Film

“Always live your life with your biography in mind.”
― Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“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?”
― Marisha Pessl, Night Film

“It’s easy to be yourself in the dark.”
― Marisha Pessl, Night Film

“I hate how the people who really get you are the ones you can never hold on to for very long. And the ones who don’t understand you at all stick around.”
― Marisha Pessl, Night Film

“People don’t realize how easy life is to change. You just get on the bus.”
― Marisha Pessl, Night Film

“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.”
― Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“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.”
― Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“Sometimes it takes more courage not to let yourself see. Sometimes knowledge is damaging - not enlightenment but enleadenment.”
― Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“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.”
― Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“Sovereign. Deadly. Perfect.”
― Marisha Pessl, Night Film

“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 ... They were always reminding themselves to stop measuring life in coffee spoons, mornings and afternoons, to keep swimming way, way down to the bottom of the ocean to find where the mermaids sang, each to each. Where there was danger and beauty and light. Only the now.”
― Marisha Pessl, Night Film

“There might be a Starbucks on every corner and an iPhone at every ear, but don’t worry, people are still fucking crazy.”
― Marisha Pessl, Night Film

“It's kind of funny...the moments on which life hinges. I think growing up you always imagine your life--your success--depends on your family and how much money they have, where you go to college, what sort of job you can pin down, starting salary...But it doesn't, you know. You wouldn't believe this, but life hinges on a couple of seconds you never see coming. And what you decide in those few seconds determines everything from then on... And you have no idea what you'll do until you're there...”
― Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“Not returning phone calls is the severest form of torture in the civilized world.”
― Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“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.”
― Marisha Pessl, Neverworld Wake

“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, strive for, wound everything around you.”
― Marisha Pessl, Night Film

“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 closet, 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 gone.”
― Marisha Pessl, Night Film

“Juliet and Romeo be damned, you can't be in love until you've flossed your teeth next to the person at least three hundred times...”
― Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“It's not fair."

"It's not. But then, that's the game. It makes life great. The fact that it ends when we don't want it to. The ending gives it meaning.”
― Marisha Pessl, Night Film

“It’s what we chase but never find. It is the mystery of our lives, the understanding that even when we have everything we want it is one day to leave us. It’s the something unseen, the lurking devastation, the darkness that gives our lives dimension.”
― Marisha Pessl, Night Film

“Some people are as fragile as butterflies and sensitive and it’s your responsibility not to destroy them. Just because you can”
― Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“[Adapted and condensed Valedictorian speech:]

I'm going to ask that you seriously consider modeling your life, not in the manner of the Dalai Lama or Jesus - though I'm sure they're helpful - but something a bit more hands-on, Carassius auratus auratus, commonly known as the domestic goldfish. People make fun of the goldfish. People don't think twice about swallowing it. Jonas Ornata III, Princeton class of '42, appears in the Guinness Book of World Records for swallowing the greatest number of goldfish in a fifteen-minute interval, a cruel total of thirty-nine. In his defense, though, I don't think Jonas understood the glory of the goldfish, that they have magnificent lessons to teach us. If you live like a goldfish, you can survive the harshest, most thwarting of circumstances. You can live through hardships that make your cohorts - the guppy, the neon tetra - go belly-up at the first sign of trouble. There was an infamous incident described in a journal published by the Goldfish Society of America - a sadistic five-year-old girl threw hers to the carpet, stepped on it, not once but twice - luckily she'd done it on a shag carpet and thus her heel didn't quite come down fully on the fish. After thirty harrowing seconds she tossed it back into its tank. It went on to live another forty-seven years. They can live in ice-covered ponds in the dead of winter. Bowls that haven't seen soap in a year. And they don't die from neglect, not immediately. They hold on for three, sometimes four months if they're abandoned. If you live like a goldfish, you adapt, not across hundreds of thousands of years like most species, having to go through the red tape of natural selection, but within mere months, weeks even. You give them a little tank? They give you a little body. Big tank? Big body. Indoor. Outdoor. Fish tanks, bowls. Cloudy water, clear water. Social or alone. The most incredible thing about goldfish, however, is their memory. Everyone pities them for only remembering their last three seconds, but in fact, to be so forcibly tied to the present - it's a gift. They are free. No moping over missteps, slip-ups, faux pas or disturbing childhoods. No inner demons. Their closets are light filled and skeleton free. And what could be more exhilarating than seeing the world for the very first time, in all of its beauty, almost thirty thousand times a day? How glorious to know that your Golden Age wasn't forty years ago when you still had all you hair, but only three seconds ago, and thus, very possibly it's still going on, this very moment." I counted three Mississippis in my head, though I might have rushed it, being nervous. "And this moment, too." Another three seconds. "And this moment, too." Another. "And this moment, too.”
― Marisha Pessl

“Betrayal isn't ridiculous. It's the reason empires fall.”
― Marisha Pessl, Night Film

“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.”
― Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“…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, Night Film

“...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.”
― Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics

“…how monstrous the people you loved could be.”
― Marisha Pessl, Night Film

“Look at Picasso. O’Neill. Tennessee Williams. Capote. Were these shiny happy people spreading sunshine? No. Only the greatest of personal demons can force you to do powerful work.”
― Marisha Pessl, Night Film

“As much as some people would like to believe, for their own peace of mind, that the appearance of evil in this world had a clean cause, the truth was never that simple.”
― Marisha Pessl, Night Film