Quotes from Marisha Pessl

There was quantum mechanics, string theory, and then there was the most mind-bending frontier of the natural world, women .

It was at this time I learned that the human mind is a blackened overgrown place. Society tries to mow the lawn and trim back the plants, but every one of us is just days away from a wild jungle. And it's the jungle that interests me.

suddenly I was a kid in the hall standing outside my locker about to head to Math. But 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.

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.)

It's a common feeling for people to feel intermittent antipathy toward individuals they're familiar with.

Most people ended up, after only a couple of months, far, far away from where they'd intended to go, stuck in some barbed underbrush of a quagmire when they'd meant to head straight to the ocean.

Moe was a triple threat." "He could sing, dance, and act?" She shook her head. "He could speak Armenian, saddle break a stallion, and pass for a female in drag.

Sometimes people can surprise the hell outta you. Sometimes they can tear your heart out and turn it to putty, can't they?

Always live your life with your biography in mind, Dad was fond of saying. Naturally, it won't be published unless you have a Magnificent Reason, but at the very least you will be living grandly.

You want the girl next door? Go next door!

Dad said certain people's sanity, in order to maintain a healthy equilibrium, required getting messy once in a while, what he called going Chekhovian: 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.

Secrets —even in hardened criminals, they were just air pockets lodged under debris at the bottom of an ocean. It might take an earthquake, or you scuba diving down there, sifting through the sludge, but their natural proclivity was always to head straight to the surface— to get out .

You journalists bulldoze life's mysteries, ignorant of what you're so ruthlessly turning up.

All worthwhile tales possess some element of violence.

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

My films are just stories, but that's all we have, the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves. When you talk to the elderly, men and women at the end of their lives, you see that's what's left behind as the body disintegrates. Our stories. Our children will decide whether or not to keep telling them.

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)

His characters are ravaged, beaten. They walk through infernos and emerge charred doves.

And so fleas look up at the sky and wonder why stars .

Freak the ferocious out.

watching a midforties Wonder Woman stumble backward into Hannah's net stack of Traveler magazines made me wonder if the very idea of Growing Up was a sham, the bus out of town you're so busy waiting for, you don't notice it never actually comes.

Grab the work when it comes, my man. Your competition is now a fourteen-year-old in pajamas with the username Truth-ninja-12 who believes fact-checking a story is reading his subject's Twitter feed. Be afraid.

What, really, was the difference between something hounding you and something leading you somewhere?

Making love to Aurelia was like rummaging through a card catalog in a deserted library, searching for one very obscure, little-read entry on Hungarian poetry.