Quotes from Marisha Pessl

When your child is seized by an idea with the zeal of a fundamentalist Bible salesman from Indiana, stand in his or her way at your own risk.

The church's entrance was strewn with the dark immobile forms of men in bulky overcoats, asleep on cardboard boxes. They might have been dark whales, caught unaware by a tide that suddenly receded, leaving them stranded on the steps.

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 with all their might, even when they're no longer there.

When it was daylight, we'd been sitting on a stoop watching the street get light. She mentioned the light took eight minutes to leave the sun and reach us. You couldn't help but love that light traveling so far through the loneliest of spaces to get here, to come so far. It was like we were the only two people in the world.

Mögest du für die Wahrheit kämpfen -, für deine eigene Wahrheit, nicht für die Wahrheit anderer

Just when you think you've hit rock bottom, you realize you're standing on another trapdoor.

Because I saw, suddenly, how it would always be for me, Sam's life unfolding like slides in an old projector I'd always be clicking through in the dark, stunning leaps forward in time--but never the uncut reel.

It was a fluke. But then, life is.

Life had been a suit I'd only put on for special occasions. Most of the time I'd 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, down pours and blistering sun, the fabric faded, buttons gone.

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.

I suggest you resolve yourself to your fate

God, the boring relative everyone ignores—no one calls, no one writes—until they need a serious favor.

The mind does its best to lessen the impact of any catastrophe. It really tries its best. But then the distance between reality and woven fantasy becomes too great for even the mind to bear. All those words of calm and relief, the hope that everything will be all right in the end, can't help stretching and tearing and fading to nothing. Then you wake up screaming.

He could barely open his eyes. 'Hello? You there, God? It's me Judy.' 'Kipling. Can you hear me?' 'I'd like to order room service, please. I'd like the spaghetti Bolognese.' He rolled off the raft into the pool, sinking. I pulled off my shoes and raincoat and dove after him, finding him drifting motionless along the bottom. Madly I kicked back to the surface. 'Kipling! Can you hear me? 'It's the final countdown,' He sang, his eyes slits. I was the lone nurse working in a madhouse.

Mostly I thought of Martha, who she was and what she had done for me. There wasn't a moment of my life that I didn't owe to her. Sometimes it rendered me listless and sad, made me say no to the frat party, the Sunday-night pizza feast, the Spring Fling, and I'd hole up alone in my dorm, drawing or writing lyrics, left with the painful truth of it, how the people who change us are the ones we never saw clearly at all, not until they were gone.

Most of the kids had been so mentally screwed up by their parents they needed more than twelve weeks of wilderness. They needed reincarnation. To die and just come back as a grasshopper, as a fucking weed. That'd be preferable to the agony they were in just by being alive.

As I scaled some rocks, I didn't move out of the way in time as a wave crashed to shore and I got soaked up to my shins in icy water. I could forget about a Russian vor; I was going to look like Tom Hanks in goddamn Cast Away by the time I arrived.

I think I've heard this story before. He died alone? Everyone dies alone.

I miss him every single day, he said. 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.

People don't realize how easy life is to change. You just get on the bus.

It was true. After our divorce, I'd ended up in a slight relationship with my last research assistant, Aurelia Feinstein, age 34-though let me state for the record it was not as hot as it sounded. Making love to Aurelia was like rummaging through a card catalog in a deserted library, searching for one very obscure little red entry on Hungarian poetry. It was dead silent, no one gave me any dierection, and nothing was where it was supposed to be.

I know Long Island like I know my kitchen. I understand it's there for my pleasure and enjoyment, but somehow I never manage to go there.

The girl was about as stealthy as a semi hauling a wide load.

I'm not afraid of total failure. In the end, we're all just food for worms, so what are we so worried about?