Marisha Pessl Quotes

For no reason I can think of, I've wandered far astray. And that is how I got to where I find myself today.

If you walk backwards, you'll find out you can go forwards and people won't know if you're coming or going.

You get born and you try this and you don't know why, only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings, only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don't know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way.

It's amazing how confused and distracted and misdirected so many people are.

I misdirect the audience, so they have no idea where they are or who they're listening to.

One wanders to the left, another to the right. Both are equally in error, but, are seduced by different delusions.

We are asleep with compasses in our hands.

They would hear 3000 and think it was the year 3000, I was hoping it would sort of disorient them and prepare them for the strange message they were about to receive.

Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.

Here's a secret: Everyone, if they live long enough, will lose their way at some point. You will lose your way; you will wake up one morning and find yourself lost. This is a hard, simple truth.

'The Names' is a story about a woman who might feel that she's in a kind of maze. She's unable to find her way forward or out because she can't see the whole picture.

I could not have told where those damned islands were within 2,000 miles.

Keep people off-balance and in the dark by never revealing the purpose behind your actions. If they have no clue what you are up to, they cannot prepare a defense.

I've never felt like I fit in. I always feel like I'm walking in the wrong direction or swimming upstream.

For quite some time, I lost my way, not only business-wise but personally.

The cities, the roads, the countryside, the people I meet - they all begin to blur. I tell myself I am searching for something. But more and more, it feels like I am wandering, waiting for something to happen to me, something that will change everything, something that my whole life has been leading up to.

I stand on the end platform of the tram and am completely unsure of my footing in this world, in this town, in my family. Not even casually could I indicate any claims that I might rightly advance in any direction. I have not even any defense to offer for standing on this platform, holding on to this strap, letting myself be carried along by this tram, nor for the people who give way to the tram or walk quietly along or stand gazing into shop windows. Nobody asks me to put up a defense, indeed, but that is irrelevant.

She was also, by the standards of other people, lost. She would not see it like that. She knew where she was, it was just that everywhere else didn't.

In the airport, luggage-laden people rush hither and yon through endless corridors, like souls to each of whom the devil has furnished a different, inaccurate map of the escape route from hell.

You can get so confused that you'll start in to race down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace and grind on for miles across weirdish wild space, headed, I fear, toward a most useless place. The Waiting Place.

Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away.

I'm here to confuse you. Confusion is my right and left hook.

Today the earth is populated with billions of people desperately hoping to “get somewhere,” but having no idea of where they’re going.

Wolves never look more funny than when they have lost the scent and scrabble to find it again: they hop in the air; they run in circles, they plow up the ground with their noses . . . .

He sat watching the people go by, wondering how a thing of this sort could have come about, I must have let myself get mixed up in something horrible, he thought ... Probably she's the one who did it; I have no control of myself or anything that's happened. So now I'm waking up. I'm awake, he thought ... I've been destroyed and now that I'm awake all I can do is realize it ... The shock of getting up there and telling that account made me see. Mixture of lies and bits of truth. Woven together. Unable to see where each starts.