Quotes from Marisha Pessl

For a girl with nothing to her name but a parakeet, to have such unwavering belief in the reckoning of evil in the world—a belief I could never bring myself to have, having seen, time and time again, depravity go unchecked—it awed me, and it was some time before I could bring myself to speak.

There's no human way to get to it, not even with all the dynamite in the world. So you leave it at that. And you move on.

There was an unspoken understanding that when a reporter chased a story, hunches and theories became airborne and other reporters could catch them like a cold.

You have to design your life like it's a fresh America. An unseen brave new world sits before you. Every. Single. Day. What are you going to do about it?

Mortal fear is as crucial a thing to our lives as love.

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," wrote Albert Pooley in The Imperial Consort of the Dairy Queen (1981, p. 233).

The Latin poet wrote 'Amor vincit omnia,' or 'Love conquers all.' He did not write, 'Love frees all' or 'liberates' all, and therein lies the first degree of our flagrant misunderstanding. Conquer: to defeat, subjugate, massacre, cream, make mincemeat out of. Surely

You're a Dusky Flying Fox," he told me. "A what?" "An extinct species of mammal known only by a single specimen. You were spotted once in 1874 on Percy Island off the coast of Queensland, Australia. No other examples of you were ever found.

I could hear his breathing, every breath he borrowed from the world then set free.

The box represents the mysterious threshold between reality and make-believe. Is it Reinhart's? Is it Thistleton's? Or is it yours? 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. And if it were opened, would anything be set free? No. For the impenetrable prison with the impossible lock is your own head.

That was women for you -- always morphing. One minute they were helpless, needing shelter and English muffins, the next they were ruthlessly bending you to their will like you were a piece of sheet metal.

What in the hell was happening to me? How flimsy sanity was.

He was, after all, Darrow's rock star, its heartthrob-musical-genius-Shakespeare, the boy who made spontaneous rapping, poetry, and wearing tweed caps cool (all small miracles unto themselves)—the kid everyone loved, longed for, yet simultaneously wished dead. He had it. An energy force field.

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 iLoved you.

if my dad put half the energy he did into cutting corners into just driving around the corner, he'd be a billionaire.

There it is, he'd say reverentially. The box represents the mysterious threshold between reality and make believe.

Maybe she was really good at improv. I couldn't be certain she was nineteen or that her name really was Nora Halliday. Maybe she was like one of those sweaters with an innocent little thread hanging off of it: One pull, the whole thing unraveled.

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

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.

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 laughter, were ironed out. Few survived real money.

Every paradise has its viper.

what it's all for. We're living longer, we social network alone with our screens, and our depth of feeling gets shallower. Soon it'll be nothing but a tide pool, then a thimble of water, then a micro drop. They say in the next twenty years we're going to merge with computer chips to cure aging and become immortal. Who wants an eternity of being a machine?

A wife sets the ambience of a man's life.

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. And if it were opened, would anything be set free? No. For the impenetrable prison with the impossible lock is your own head.