Top 120 Marisha Pessl Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “A man so far out of his league he suffered from altitude sickness.”

— Marisha Pessl

52. “We’re living longer, we social network alone with our screens, and our depth of feeling gets shallower.”

— Marisha Pessl

53. “As much as some people would like to believe, for their own peace of mind, that the appearance of evil in this world had a clean cause, the truth was never that simple.”

— Marisha Pessl

54. “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.”

— Marisha Pessl

55. “When I’m creating characters, I definitely think of theme songs. Writing for me is very visual, so I sometimes think of it in terms of a movie with a soundtrack, and try to transfer that to words.”

— Marisha Pessl

56. “She told me her father taught her to live life way beyond the cusp of it, way out in the outer reaches where most people never had the guts to go, where you got hurt. Where there was unimaginable beauty and pain... 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, each to each. Where there was danger and beauty and light. Only the now.”

— Marisha Pessl

57. “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.”

— Marisha Pessl

58. “Because I saw, suddenly, how it would always be for me, Sam’s life unfolding like slides in an old projector I’d always be clicking through in the dark, stunning leaps forward in time – but never the uncut reel.”

— Marisha Pessl

59. “I was aware now, as ever, that between all people there were First Times You See Them and Last Times you See Them.”

— Marisha Pessl

60. “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.”

— Marisha Pessl

61. “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.”

— Marisha Pessl

62. “The body shuts down when it’s too sad,” said my dad.”

— Marisha Pessl

63. “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.”

— Marisha Pessl

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

— Marisha Pessl

65. “Certainly one of the surprising truths of having a book published is realizing that your book is as open to interpretation as an abstract painting. People bring their own beliefs and attitudes to your work, which is thrilling and surprising at the same time.”

— Marisha Pessl

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

— Marisha Pessl

67. “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? Do you want to know what is there or live in the dark delusion that this commercial world insists we remain sealed inside like blind caterpillars in an eternal cocoon? Will you curl up with your eyes closed and die? Or can you fight your way out of it and fly?”

— Marisha Pessl

68. “I took a step inside to get a better look and realized the man was actually Christ, the way he appeared in Sunday-school classrooms: milky complexion, starched blue dressing gown, a beard trimmed as painstakingly as a bonsai tree. He was doing what he was always doing: cupping blinding light in his hands like he was trying to warm up after a long day of downhill skiing.”

— Marisha Pessl

69. “That was women for you – always morphing. One minute they were helpless, needing shelter and English muffins, the next they were ruthlessly bending you to their will like you were a piece of sheet metal.”

— Marisha Pessl

70. “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

71. “It was always surprising to me how ferociously the public mourned a beautiful stranger – especially one from a famous family. 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 though, At least it wasn’t me.”

— Marisha Pessl

72. “When it was daylight, we’d been sitting on a stoop watching the street get light. She mentioned the light took eight minutes to leave the sun and reach us. You couldn’t help but love that light traveling so far through the loneliest of spaces to get here, to come so far. It was like we were the only two people in the world.”

— Marisha Pessl

73. “Every paradise has its viper.”

— Marisha Pessl

74. “Such things as anguish, woe, affliction, guilt, feelings of awfulness, and utter wretchedness, the bread and butter of Days of Yore and Russians, sadly have very little staying power in these lickety-split Modern Times.”

— Marisha Pessl

75. “We are all anthologies. We are each thousands of pages long, filled with fairy tales and poetry, mysteries and tragedy, forgotten stories in the back no one will ever read.”

— Marisha Pessl

76. “His characters are ravaged, beaten. They walk through infernos and emerged charred doves.”

— Marisha Pessl

77. “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.”

— Marisha Pessl

78. “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.”

— Marisha Pessl

79. “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.”

— Marisha Pessl

80. “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.”

— Marisha Pessl

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

— Marisha Pessl

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

— Marisha Pessl

83. “We aren’t on Earth to be happy, but to experience incredible things.”

— Marisha Pessl

84. “Everyone associated with the slow printed word is fast becoming the Great Crested Newt of the culture. First it was the poets, the playwrights, then the novelists. Veteran newspapermen are next.”

— Marisha Pessl

85. “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.”

— Marisha Pessl

86. “It was never the act itself but our own understanding of it that defeated us, over and over again.”

— Marisha Pessl

87. “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.”

— Marisha Pessl

88. “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.”

— Marisha Pessl

89. “I believe writers need to be chameleons, or like Meryl Streep, who can play all sorts of characters. A good writer should be able to cross gender lines and people of all social classes. So for me, writing from a male point of view would be a great challenge, that I would look forward to taking on.”

— Marisha Pessl

90. “You journalists bulldoze life’s mysteries, ignorant of what you’re so ruthlessly turning up.”

— Marisha Pessl

91. “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.”

— Marisha Pessl

92. “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.”

— Marisha Pessl

93. “When your child is seized by an idea with the zeal of a fundamentalist Bible salesman from Indiana, stand in his or her way at your own risk.”

— Marisha Pessl

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

— Marisha Pessl

95. “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.”

— Marisha Pessl

96. “What you tend to find in the personal lives of brilliant men is devastation akin to a nuclear bomb going off.”

— Marisha Pessl

97. “It’s hard, in America, not to equate ‘happiness’ with ‘things’.”

— Marisha Pessl

98. “What, really, was the difference between something hounding you and something leading you somewhere?”

— Marisha Pessl

99. “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?”

— Marisha Pessl

100. “Juliet and Romeo be damned, you can’t be in love until you’ve flossed your teeth next to the person at least three hundred times...”

— Marisha Pessl