Marisha Pessl Quotes

People think I'm all calm, but underneath I'm not.

Fighting the ongoing war in your day-to-day life, everybody has their battle going on that nobody else knows about.

You never know what is going on in someone's head when they you think they are leading the perfect life.

I'm conflicted because I like being in deserts. I find them sort of cleansing, but there's another part of me that hates dust. And I particularly hate dust in cars, so it's a huge conflict going on there.

What a fearfully distracting, perplexing and heart-searching business it is to live.

Underneath this veneer of slightly crazy and mildly socially retarded, I'm a complete disaster.

And because he felt like he might burst open and because he lacked the dexterity in English to say all that he was thinking--how in his estimation, the more you lived the more regret and longing you suffered, that life was a glorious catastrophe--Pasquale Tursi said, only, "Yes.

I was not a lovable child, and I'd grown into a deeply unlovable adult. Draw a picture of my soul, and it'd be a scribble with fangs.

In the depths of every heart there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and the revelry above may cause us to forget their existence.

Life is messy, Ren. It's not easy and it's definitely not for the timid. Everyone has a past.

She was a sea: and I had to swim in her.

Everyone says "I wish I was in your shoes...", the hundreds of people that wish they were in my shoes don't know the tenth of it. If they were in my shoes they would cry like a baby.

How much easier my life would be if I did not love you! I thought. How much less painful, but how much plainer. How much less color there would be in the world.

It is becoming a bad dream-- in the daytime as well as at night. I see him nearly all the time and can't get at him, I mustn't show anything, must remain gay while I'm really in despair.

You're never gonna outwrite the movement of the white clouds and the blue sky. You're never going to. There are times when I try to write beautifully, but I don't know if I'm trying to exorcise my own demons. If I am, there are other ones lurking beneath, because they keep coming out. Maybe little by little I'm fumigating.

In my madness I see your face in mine.

i know he's been looking forward to this--and i know that i've been looking forward to this. but now i have to stop looking forward and start looking at where i am. it's hard.

I don't want to die but I ain't keen on living either

I'm constantly having doubts and moments of depression and then excitement and then back into the slough of despond.

Conflict, which rouses up the best and highest powers in some characters, in others not only jars the whole being, but paralyzes the faculties.

The Shell The sea fills my ear with sand and with fear. You may wash out the sand, but never the sound of the ghost of the sea that is haunting me.

I wanna run, i wanna stay. hold every piece, so it won't break.

I saw endless depths of brown, the depths I'd fallen into so many times. No red rings. Dimitri...was not a Strigoi. And he was weeping.

He raged for hours. And the skeleton, ever the frail and solelmn philosopher, hung quietly inside, saying not a word, suspended like a delicate insect within a chrysalis, waiting and waiting.

Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear