Top 120 Marisha Pessl Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Always live your life with your biography in mind.”

— Marisha Pessl

2. “Just when you think you’ve hit rock bottom, you realize you’re standing on another trapdoor.”

— Marisha Pessl

3. “Within every elaborate lie, a kernel of truth.”

— Marisha Pessl

4. “Not returning phone calls is the severest form of torture in the civilized world.”

— Marisha Pessl

5. “I’m not afraid of total failure. In the end, we’re all just food for worms, so what are we so worried about?”

— Marisha Pessl

6. “Some people are as fragile as butterflies and sensitive and it’s your responsibility not to destroy them. Just because you can.”

— Marisha Pessl

7. “But when you flee someone, no matter how far you roam, that person will follow you as doggedly as the stars.”

— Marisha Pessl

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

— Marisha Pessl

9. “You want the girl next door? Go next door!”

— Marisha Pessl

10. “You are a magnificent and powerful person,” I said.”

— Marisha Pessl

11. “Show me what a man hates and I’ll show you what he is.”

— Marisha Pessl

12. “When you grow up – and from the look of things, you have awhile – but you learn things never go back to normal simply because everyone’s sorry. Sorry is ridiculous.”

— Marisha Pessl

13. “Happiness is a hound dog in the sun. We aren’t on Earth to be happy, but to experience incredible things. – Hannah Schneider.”

— Marisha Pessl

14. “It’s not fair. It’s not. But then, that’s the game. It makes life great. The fact that it ends when we don’t want it to. The ending gives it meaning.”

— Marisha Pessl

15. “May you walk a lighted path. May you fight for truth – your truth, not someone else’s – and may you understand, above all things, that you are the most important concept, theory, and philosophy I have ever known.”

— Marisha Pessl

16. “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.”

— Marisha Pessl

17. “For every man there exists bait he cannot resist swallowing.”

— Marisha Pessl

18. “People don’t realize how easy life is to change. You just get on the bus.”

— Marisha Pessl

19. “Betrayal isn’t ridiculous. It’s the reason empires fall.”

— Marisha Pessl

20. “Life was a freight train barreling toward just one stop, our loved ones streaking past our windows in blurs of color and light. There was no holding on to any of it, and no slowing it down.”

— Marisha Pessl

21. “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.”

— Marisha Pessl

22. “I was a ticking clock in a timeless world.”

— Marisha Pessl

23. “Mortal fear is as crucial a thing to our lives as love. It cuts to the core of our being and shows us what we are. Will you step back and cover your eyes? Or will you have the strength to walk to the precipice and look out?”

— Marisha Pessl

24. “He said you couldn’t pretend the terrible things in life didn’t happen. You can’t clean it up. You keep all the refuse and the scars. It’s how you learn. And try to make improvements.”

— Marisha Pessl

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

— Marisha Pessl

26. “Most people ended up, after only a couple of months, so 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.”

— Marisha Pessl

27. “People had an illogical, self-serving rationale when it came to interpreting the behavior of others.”

— Marisha Pessl

28. “Like that lightning that comes out of the blue when there’s not even a storm going on, just a crazy crack in the sky. With something like that right in front of you, you can’t help but feel there’s new possibilities out there.”

— Marisha Pessl

29. “Some stories you should run from while you still have legs.”

— Marisha Pessl

30. “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.”

— Marisha Pessl

31. “It’s a common feeling for people to feel intermittent antipathy toward individuals they’re familiar with.”

— Marisha Pessl

32. “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.”

— Marisha Pessl

33. “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.”

— Marisha Pessl

34. “If I scribbled a few words on a cocktail napkin and showed it to my family, they’d proclaim it astonishing and more culturally relevant than the Bible.”

— Marisha Pessl

35. “The store was empty, without a single customer or employee. It appeared in the Internet age, pianos, like physical books, were fast becoming culturally extinct. They’d probably stay that way unless Apple invented the iPiano, which fit inside your pocket and could be mastered via text message. With the iPiano, anyone can be an iMozart. Then, you could compose your own iRequiem for your own iFuneral attended by millions of your iFriends who iLoved you.”

— Marisha Pessl

36. “It’s got to be some kind of cult. Anyone offers you Kool-Aid or a hot shower, say no.”

— Marisha Pessl

37. “Sadly, American teenagers are to a weightless vacuum as seat cushions are to polyurethane foam -.”

— Marisha Pessl

38. “God, the boring relative everyone ignores – no one calls, no one writes – until they need a serious favor.”

— Marisha Pessl

39. “Sovereign. Deadly. Perfect.”

— Marisha Pessl

40. “In college I studied ’60s and ’70s radicalism, student activism, forms of political violence, groups like the Weathermen, the Black Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the New Left.”

— Marisha Pessl

41. “Love? Dopamine released in the brain, which gets depleted over time, leaving contempt.”

— Marisha Pessl

42. “It’s what we chase but never find. It is the mystery of our lives, the understanding that even when we have everything we want it is one day to leave us. It’s the something unseen, the lurking devastation, the darkness that gives our lives dimension.”

— Marisha Pessl

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

— Marisha Pessl

44. “We’re living longer, we social network alone with our screens, and our depth of feeling gets shallower. Soon it’ll be nothing but a tide pool, then a thimble of water, then a micro drop.”

— Marisha Pessl

45. “It’s funny how the night that changes your life forever starts out like all the others.”

— Marisha Pessl

46. “What in the hell was happening to me? How flimsy sanity was.”

— Marisha Pessl

47. “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.”

— Marisha Pessl

48. “I could hear his breathing, every breath he borrowed from the world then set free.”

— Marisha Pessl

49. “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, ” Dad was fond of commenting while standing with the freezer door open and inspecting every flavor of Ben and Jerry’s, oblivious to the customers swarming around him, waiting for him to move.”

— Marisha Pessl

50. “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 unhappy families can, to their great alarm, be happy.”

— Marisha Pessl