Quotes from Marisha Pessl

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.

Landlocked Switzerland: They're Nice and Neutral Only Because They're Tiny

The truth about what happens to us in this world keeps changing Ã¢â'¬Â¦ it never stops.

That was just how Jim was. He saturated. He overflowed. He drowned.

It's funny how the night that changes your life forever starts out like all the others.

We're living longer, we social network alone with our screens, and our depth of feeling gets shallower.

But that was how it went sometimes, the English language, when you really needed it, crumbled to clay in your mouth.

She [Whitley] was the only girl I knew who surveyed everyone like a leather-clad Dior model and rattled off Latin like it was her native language.

Connie Madison Parker, age 36, on Merchandise: You got to put your goods on display, babe. Otherwise, not only will the boys ignore you but—an' trust me on this, my sister's flat as you—we're talkin' the Great Plains of East Texas — no landmarks — one day you'll look down and have no wares at all. What'll you do then?

Always life your life with your biography in mind. Naturally, it won't be published unless you have a magnificent reason, but at the very least you'll be living grandly.

The bad things that happen to you don't have to mean anything at all. And anyway, he'll answer to God for what he did. She announced this with great certainty. 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.

Astrid taught me some of the words. I've never forgotten them. One was 'terulya.' It meant deep-diving love, a love that excavates you. It's something you have to have before you die in order to have lived.

I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until I became that person. Or he became me.' In the end, a man turns into what he thinks he is, however large or small.

Maybe it was a consequence of reaching the end of the end, finding out the dark, mad, gleaming tale had concluded the only way it could in the real world--with mortal people doing mortal things, a father and daughter, facing their deaths.

Into that empty form they could unload the grief and regret of their own lives, be rid of it, feel lucky and light for a few days, comforted by the thought, At least that wasn't me.

He was one of those people you initially believed had a foreign accent, though it turned out he was American, only spoke delicately, as if every word were something to be carefully dusted off and held up to the light.

It's the final countdown,' " he sang

The million-dollar marital Band-Aid, never a wise idea.

perhaps she figured I was already a highly forgiving person, that I did my best to treat shortcomings like hobos I'd found dozing on my porch: take them in and maybe they'll work for you.

Books give us new lives, loves, and the feeling we aren't alone.

Well, everyone and their grandmother knows she's still banging Charles after all these years — Like a screen in a tornado. Sure.

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.

You know what Confucius said? Remind me. Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves

I'd like to make a minor adjustment to Leo Tolstoy's oft-quoted first sentence: All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and when it comes to the Holiday Season, happy families can abruptly become unhappy and happy families can, to their great alarm, be happy.