Quotes from Marisha Pessl

Magic was all fun and games until you had the H-bomb of spell materials on the bottom of your shoes.

I remembered what Dad said once, that some people have all of life's answers worked out the day they're born and there's no use trying to teach them anything new. 'They're closed for business even though, somewhat confusingly, their doors open at eleven, Monday through Friday,' Dad said. And the trying to change what they think, the attempt to explain, the hope they'll come to see your side of things, it was exhausting, because it never made a dent and afterward you only ached unbearably.

It's one of the biggest scandals of life, to learn that the cruelest thing someone could say to you was you were a terrible kisser.

The bad things that happen to you don't have to mean anything at all.

You think you know everything. But you don't. Life and people are right in front of you and you act superior and make jokes but it's just a cover for the fact that you're scared.

We swear we see each other, but all we are ever able to make out is a tiny porthole view of an ocean. We think we remember the past, but our memories are as fantastic and flimsy as dreams. It's so easy to hate the pretty one, worship the genius, love the rockstar, trust the good girl. That's never their only story.

the Boston Tea Party was the work of 1777-era frat boys)

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

Concert pianists get to be quite chummy with dead composers. They can't help it. Classical music isn't just music . It's a personal diary. An uncensored confession in the dead of night. A baring of the soul. Take a modern example. Florence and the Machine? In the song 'Cosmic Love,' she catalogs the way in which the world has gone dark, distorting her, when she, a rather intense young woman, was left bereft by a love affair. 'The stars, the moon, they have all been blown out.

It's wonderful to get lost in a piece of music, she'd said. To forget your name for a while.

Love is this elusive bird, he said. You're the lifelong bird-watcher, looking for this rare red-plumed quail people spend entire lives trying to see for three seconds in a cherry tree on a mountaintop in Japan. You're mistaking love for perfection, I said. Real love when it's there? It's just there. It's a metal folding chair.

He chose you because a plain setting makes the diamond sparkle brighter.

Time leeches most horror and pain from our memories.

The dark side of life has a way of finding us all anyway, so stop chasing it.

I thus concluded, with the same awe of Jane Goodall discovering the chimpanzees' nimble use of tools to extract termites, it really wasn't so much the tragic event itself, but others having knowledge of it that prevented recovery.

If all histories have a period known as The Golden Age, somewhere between The Beginning and The End, I suppose those Sundays during Fall Semester at Hannah's were just that, or, to quote one of Dad's treasured characters of cinema, the illustrious Norma Desmond as she recalled the lost era of silent film: We didn't need dialogue. We had faces.

So I would die in here. I'd leave my little life. I'd barely worn it out. 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 closest, 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.

One of my pet peeves was when an adult imagined they had to encapsulate Life for you, hand you Life in a jar, in an eyedropper, in a penguin paperweight full of snow-A Collector's Dream.

It was as if Hannah had sprung a leak and her character, usually so meticulous and contained, was spilling all over the place.

I actually felt awed by the remote possibilities of the person you liked ever liking you back a corresponding amount.

they're weak, petty, so apathetic about this gift of life as if it were all a mere Pepsi commercial.

Today dies a crooked and gluttonus man' - it was true, at least literally; McCullough allegedly weighed three hundred pounds and suffered from scoliosis.

I don't believe . Religion? Humans desperate to take out infinity insurance. Death? The great big nada . Love? Dopamine released in the brain, which gets depleted over time, leaving contempt.

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.