Quotes from Marisha Pessl

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.

was what accidental deaths did to people, made everybody's sea floor irregular and uneven, causing tidal currents to collide, surge upwards, thereby resulting in small yet volatile eddies churning at everybody's surface. (In the more dangerous

even though adults were tall, what we knew about anything, including ourselves, was small.

Take all the time you need.

Two: there was no car in the driveway, so the question of how he'd come here without an umbrella yet remained perfectly dry hung in the air, vaguely alarming, like a faint odor of gas.

There were no street signs along Benton Hollow Road, no house numbers, no streetlights, not even any lines—just my car's faded headlights, which didn't so much push back the advancing dark as nervously rummage through it.

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 iLoved you.

He also had a gung-ho hairline. It couldn't wait to get started

moment to survey one another. Hopper looked

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.

He seemed about to ask me something else, but instead turned, strolling across the parking lot, pulling out his cigarettes. It was after four o'clock. The sun had loosened its grip on the world, letting the shadows get sloppy, the light, thawed and soft.

On the table in front of her was a plate of half-finished French toast, floating like a houseboat on the Mississippi in a pool of syrup.

I closed my eyes, letting my fear wash over me. I had to bathe in it, accept it, drink it down, let it cover me like sludge, so it became nothing so extraordinary, nothing so fearsome—and I could think.

He needed me because he wanted to cling to God now. God, the boring relative everyone ignores—no one calls, no one writes—until they need a serious favor." He

as the rain beat the windows like an army trying to get in.

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 iLoved you.

that was how it went sometimes, the English language, when you really needed it, crumbled to clay in your mouth. That's when all the real things were said.

Wir sind alle Anthologien. Wir sind Tausende von Seiten lang, voller Märchen und Poesie, Geheimnisse und Tragödien und vergessener Geschichten ganz am Ende, die nie jemand lesen wird.

Look around. It's almost gone. If only someone had told me that before. About life. If only I had understood.

a five-pointed star surrounded by a circle, a pentagram—the symbol for Satanists, if I remembered correctly from my college days.

But here I would cite the philosophy of M. Scott Peck. In all groups there are four stages. Pseudocommunity. Chaos. Emptiness. And true community.

I haven't always been a writer and I suppose I tiptoed around the idea of writing full time, because it's so isolating.

If I scribbled a few words on a cocktail napkin and showed it to my family, they'd proclaim it astonishing and more culturally relevant than the Bible.

I think every writer has a book that haunts them, and on some level, every book you write is a reaction to it. 'Lolita' is that book for me. Nabokov's love of wordplay, descriptive detail, artfully complex plots, and his themes of obsession and lost love, are inspiring.