Marisha Pessl Quotes

Between knowing and not knowing is not wanting to know.

There's a road to hell that is paved with good intentions but it's a long route. The quicker path is paved with the kind of ignorance that clever men who just don't want to know are best at.

Life is what you allow yourself not to see.

It is not... That some people do not know what to do with truth when it is offered to them, But the tragic fate is to reach, after patient search, a condition of mind-blindness, in which. The truth is not recognized, though it stares you in the face.

We love to overlook the boundaries which we do not wish to pass.

Denial of our pattern of failure seems to be a kind of practical atheism or chosen ignorance among many believers and clergy.

But the upside of painful knowledge is so much greater than the downside of blissful ignorance.

To most of us nothing is so invisible as an unpleasant truth. Though it is held before our eyes, pushed under our noses, rammed down our throats- we know it not.

The whole family of pride and ignorance are incestuous, and mutually beget each other

If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.

Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves.

But what if...what if you sincerely believed something was true, but you were dead wrong? What if you were so stubbornly sure that you were right, that you wouldn’t even consider the truth? Would the truth be silenced, or would it try to break through?

To never see a fool you lock yourself in your room and smash the looking-glass.

Everyone who enjoys supposes that the tree was concerned with the fruit, but it was really concerned with the seed. -In this lies the difference between all those who create and those who enjoy.

A fool always finds one still more foolish to admire him.

the leading error of the human mind, - the bane of human happiness - the perverter of human virtue ... is Religion - that dark coinage of trembling ignorance! It is Religion - that poisoner of human felicity! It is Religion - that blind guide of human reason! It is Religion - that dethroner of human virtue! which lies at the root of all the evil and all the misery that pervade the world!

We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.

The definition of an asshole is someone who doesn't believe what he is seeing.

My folks tried to make a preacher of me and missed by a narrow margin… I would have made a good one if I hadn’t fallen into the fatal folly of reading anything I could lay hands on. With just a touch more self confidence and a liberal helping of ignorance I could have been a famous evangelist.

Ignorance is a self-generating state of mind; one of its characteristics is that it doesn't recognize itself as ignorance.

We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.

Well, I'm an uncle now ... don't know if I'm a good one. My nephew asked me the difference between a hamster and a gerbil and I told him I thought there was more dark meat on a gerbil.

He never knew when he was whipped ... So he never was.

...but then the general trouble with ignorance is always that the ignorant person has no idea that that's what they are. You can be ignorant and stupid and go through your whole life without ever encountering any evidence against the hypothesis that you're a genius.

Any man who talks about his love affairs thereby proves he is ignorant of love and is moved only by vanity.