Quotes from Marisha Pessl

You see, that priest—he was still there, hanging on, silently waiting at the perimeter. An oily shadow always around.

The most we can do is hold out our hands and help each other across the unknown. For in our held hands we find pathways through the dark, across jungles and cities, bridges suspended over the deepest caverns of this world. Your friends will walk with you, holding on with all their might, even when they're no longer there.

Nora, biting her lip, pointed at the small end table on my right, where there was a black-and-white photograph in an antique silver frame. It was Olivia standing with her husband, Knightly, probably some twenty years ago. They had their arms around each other, posing beside an antique Bentley in front of a colossal country manor. They looked happy, but, of course, that didn't say much. Everyone smiles for a photograph.

But now that you mention it, will you promise to off me when I'm ninety and never leave home without an oxygen tank? Make a day of it. Just roll me and my wheelchair off the George Washington Bridge and call it a life. Deal? The request seemed to make her smile. Deal. They should really tack that on to the marriage ceremony. 'Do you promise to love, honor, obey me, and also to kill me when I can no longer stand in a shower?'?

You are a magnificent and powerful person," I said.

It was cheerful inside, without the aggressive Easy Rider feel of some of the other tattoo parlors in the city, where the handle-jawed thugs wielding the tattoo guns looked like ink was just a side job, their main work, contract killings.

Without time, nothing had meaning. Never before had I understood how crucial the passage of time was to caring about something. It gave it an expiry date, a wick, a rush, a burn. Without it, everything sat in place, dumbly waiting. In

There were two things that Beckman truly loathed in life: sitting in the first three rows of the movie theater and the Catholic Church.

She looked at me as if I were a snag in tights.

Some stories you should run from while you still have legs.

They were always reminding themselves to stop measuring life in coffee spoons, mornings and afternoons, to keep swimming way, way down to the bottom of the ocean to find where the mermaids sang.

Only the greatest of personal demons can force you to do powerful work.

The truth about what happens to us in this world keeps changing … it never stops.

I was aware of how shoddily stitched together the words were—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.

Because he was an asshole. I'm not sayin' nothin' I wouldn't say to his face. He embraced his assholeness.

Is there anything more glorious than a professor? Forget about his molding the minds, the future of a nation - a dubious assertion; there's little you can do when they tend to emerge from the womd predestined for Grand Theft Auto Vice City.

I began to experience, over the course of the next three months, full-blown insomnia. I'm not talking about the romantic kind, not the sweet sleeplessness one has when one is in love, anxiously awaiting the morn so one can rendezvous with a lover in an illicit gazebo. No, this was the torturous, clammy kind, when one's pillow slowly takes on the properties of a block of wood and one's sheets, the air of the Everglades.

I love to put my characters in the dark, it's only then that I can see exactly who they are

The notes weren't played, he went on, They were poured from a Grecian urn .

We were up the whole night just talking, walking the city. You can walk those blocks forever, take a break on the edge of the fountain, eat pizza and snow cones, awed by the human carnival all around you.

Once you slaughter the lamb, you are capable of everything and anything, and the world is yours.

I miss him every single day," she said. "I hate how the people who really get you are the ones you can never hold on to for very long. And the ones who don't understand you at all stick around. Ever noticed that?

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 closet, 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.

Is she sad? she asked. No, honey. She's lived-in.