Quotes from Marisha Pessl

A Tornado knocks a house down, killing the owner, and it's a tragedy. Then you learn a serial killer lived there and the same act becomes a miracle. The truth about what happens to us in this world keeps changing. Always. It never stops. Sometimes not even after death.

We are under an invincible blindness as to the real and true nature of things

Women of Manhattan, magnificent as they were, they forgot sometimes they weren't immortal. They could throw themselves like confetti into a fun-filled Friday night, with no thought as to what crack they fell into by Saturday.

I was a ticking clock in a timeless world

the territory between two people who were once soul mates but were no longer was akin to wandering into Pakistan's tribal region.

Justice wields an erratic sword, grants mercy to fortunate few. Yet if man doesn't fight for her, 'tis chaos he's left to.

No matter what time of day or amount of work to be done, someone with Tahiti could close his eyes and the reality of moody lawnmowers, scruffy lawns, threats of termination of employment would recede and in seconds he'd simply be in Tahiti, stark naked and drinking from a coconut, aware only of the percussion of the wind and girlish sighs of the ocean. (Few

I looked like I wasn't at a cocktail party but an airport, waiting for my life to take off. Infinitely delayed.

She was lost now, she'd been silenced- another dead branch on Cordova's warped tree.

America's greatest revelation was not the atom bomb, not Fundamentalism, not fat farms, not Elvis, not even the quite astute observation that gentlemen prefer blondes, but the great heights to which she has propelled ice cream.

It's a terrible thing, to lie. It's a field you keep seeding and watering and plowing, but nothing will ever grow on it.

When he talked about a Higher Power, he used words like gratifying , restorative and life-changing . It was something that got you through the tough times, which any young person could manage with a little hard work, trust and tenacity. God was a trip to Cancun.

Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.' 

How was it possible scientists were able to locate the edge of the observable universe, the Cosmic Light Horizon ("Our universe is 13.7 billion light years long," wrote Harry Mills Cornblow, Ph.D., with astounding confidence in The ABCs of the Cosmos [2003]), and yet mere human beings stayed so fuzzy, beyond all calculation?

somewhere, nearby voices filled with dusk, cabs and panhandlers and one drunken girl screeching like a wounded bird - all of it flushed with a warmth and sad beauty I'd never noticed before.

she was flighty and poor, a French studies major who quoted Simone de Beauvoir. She wiped her runny nose on her coat sleeve when it was snowing, stuck her head out of car windows the way dogs do, the wind fireworking her hair. That woman was gone now. Not that it was her fault. 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.

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.

One or two individuals in times of crisis turn into Heroes, a handful into Villains, the rest into Fools.

We aren't on Earth to be happy, but to experience incredible things.

How scary and sudden the shift from Living to Dead.

I hate how the people who really get you are the ones you can never hold onto for very long, and the ones who don't understand you at all stick around.

She was inches from my face, really squinting , as if it were a section of a globe she'd never closely inspected before, an ocean filled with strings of unnamed islands.

They looked happy, but, of course, that didn't say much. Everyone smiles for a photograph.

Is man's destiny determined by the vicissitudes of environment or free will? I argue that it is free will, because what we think, what we dwell upon in our heads, whether it be fears or dreams, has a direct effect upon the physical world. The more you think about your downfall, your ruin, the greater the likelihood that it will occur. And conversely, the more one thinks of victory, the more likely one will achieve it.