Top 120 Marisha Pessl Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Landlocked Switzerland: They’re Nice and Neutral Only Because They’re Tiny.”

— Marisha Pessl

102. “She was lost now, she’d been silenced- another dead branch on Cordova’s warped tree.”

— Marisha Pessl

103. “To be next to her was to have everything.”

— Marisha Pessl

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

— Marisha Pessl

105. “Good bands you can kind of lose, then come back and realize they’re still good.”

— Marisha Pessl

106. “Life does not belong to you. It is the apartment you rent. Love without fear, for love is an airplane that carries you to new lands. There is a universe in silence. A tunnel to peace in a scream. Get a good night’s sleep. Laugh when you can. You are more magical than you know. Take your advice from the elderly and children. None of it as crucial as you think, but that makes it no less vital. Our lives go on, and on. Look for the breadcrumbs.”

— Marisha Pessl

107. “Freak the ferocious out.”

— Marisha Pessl

108. “I was aware too how strange adults were, how theirs lives were vaster than they wanted anyone to realize, that they actually stretched on and on like deserts, dry and desolate, with an unpredictable, shifting sea of dunes.”

— Marisha Pessl

109. “Dad was a man who, due to his underprivileged background perhaps, never hesitated when it came to the verbs to get or to take. He was always getting something off the ground, his act together, his hands dirty, the show on the road, someone’s goat, the message, out more, on with things, lost, laid, away with murder. He was also always taking charge, the bull by the horns, back the night, something in stride, someone to the cleaners, a rain check, an axe to something, Manhattan.”

— Marisha Pessl

110. “The bad things that happen to you don’t have to mean anything at all.”

— Marisha Pessl

111. “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.”

— Marisha Pessl

112. “That was just how Jim was. He saturated. He overflowed. He drowned”.”

— Marisha Pessl

113. “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.”

— Marisha Pessl

114. “Funnily enough, it is the subject one dreads talking about at length one ends up talking about at length, often without the slightest provocation.”

— Marisha Pessl

115. “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.”

— Marisha Pessl

116. “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.”

— Marisha Pessl

117. “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.”

— Marisha Pessl

118. “On the table in front of her was a plate of half-finished French toast, floating like a houseboat on the Mississippi in a pool of syrup.”

— Marisha Pessl

119. “Books give us new lives, loves, and the feeling we aren’t alone.”

— Marisha Pessl

120. “I haven’t always been a writer and I suppose I tiptoed around the idea of writing full time, because it’s so isolating.”

— Marisha Pessl

121. “Occasionally when I’m procrastinating writing, I’ll while away the hours on iTunes. You can just keep going forever and find these bands you’d never normally hear of.”

— Marisha Pessl

122. “Mortal fear is as crucial a thing to our lives as love.”

— Marisha Pessl

123. “There was something about her playing... a knowledge of darkness in the most extreme form.”

— Marisha Pessl

124. “I love to put my characters in the dark, it’s only then that I can see exactly who they are.”

— Marisha Pessl

125. “Some people don’t want to be sober. They don’t want reality. After life trips them, they choose to stay facedown in the mud.”

— Marisha Pessl

126. “He chose you because a plain setting makes the diamond sparkle brighter.”

— Marisha Pessl

127. “Sometimes it takes more courage not to let yourself see. Sometimes knowledge is damaging – not enlightenment but enleadenment.”

— Marisha Pessl

128. “Look at Picasso. O’Neill. Tennessee Williams. Capote. Were these shiny happy people spreading sunshine? No. Only the greatest of personal demons can force you to do powerful work.”

— Marisha Pessl

129. “A wife sets the ambience of a man’s life.”

— Marisha Pessl

130. “It’s easy to be yourself in the dark.”

— Marisha Pessl

131. “The church’s entrance was strewn with the dark immobile forms of men in bulky overcoats, asleep on cardboard boxes. They might have been dark whales, caught unaware by a tide that suddenly receded, leaving them stranded on the steps.”

— Marisha Pessl

132. “Some people, every now and then, simply had to have One Too Many, go drifty voiced and slouch mouthed, swimming willfully around in their own sadness as if it were hot springs.”

— Marisha Pessl

133. “I remembered what Dad said once, that some people have all of life’s answers worked out the day they’re born and there’s no use trying to teach them anything new. ‘They’re closed for business even though, somewhat confusingly, their doors open at eleven, Monday through Friday,’ Dad said. And 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.”

— Marisha Pessl

134. “We are under an invincible blindness as to the real and true nature of things.”

— Marisha Pessl

135. “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.”

— Marisha Pessl

136. “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.”

— Marisha Pessl

137. “Why would I waste time – a highly precious, constantly diminishing resource – on transitory neurological fluctuations of adrenaline, dopamine, and serotonin?”

— Marisha Pessl