Quote

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

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Marisha Pessl
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: October 26
Writer
Clarkston
Michigan
Little
Guilt
Russians
Things
Bread
Woe
Modern
Utter
Days
Split
Yore
Times
Splits
Awfulness
Feelings
Anguish
Wretchedness
Power
Affliction
Sadly
Littles
Staying
Butter

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Sadly, American teenagers are to a weightless vacuum as seat cushions are to polyurethane foam -
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In college I studied '60s and '70s radicalism, student activism, forms of political violence, groups like the Weathermen, the Black Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the New Left.
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Always live your life with your biography in mind, Dad was fond of saying. Naturally, it won't be published unless you have a Magnificent Reason, but at the very least you will be living grandly.
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I'm not afraid of total failure. In the end, we're all just food for worms, so what are we so worried about?
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Dad's Theory of Arrogance--that everyone always assumes they're the Principal Character of Desire and/or Loathing in everybody else's Broadway Play.
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Some people are as fragile as butterflies and sensitive and it’s your responsibility not to destroy them. Just because you can
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Well, life isn't a cakewalk, is it?! Eighty-nine percent of the world's most valuable art was created by men living in rat-infested flats. You think Velásquez wore Adidas? You think he enjoyed the luxuries of central heating and twenty-four-hour pizza delivery?!
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It’s what we chase but never find. It is the mystery of our lives, the understanding that even when we have everything we want it is one day to leave us. It’s the something unseen, the lurking devastation, the darkness that gives our lives dimension.
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It was as if Hannah had sprung a leak and her character, usually so meticulous and contained, was spilling all over the place.
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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.
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Sometimes it takes more courage not to let yourself see. Sometimes knowledge is damaging - not enlightenment but enleadenment.
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Like that lightning that comes out of the blue when there's not even a storm going on, just a crazy crack in the sky. With something like that right in front of you, you can't help but feel there's new possibilities out there.
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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.
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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.
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In America, people of a certain age ask, 'Where were you when Kennedy was shot?' In my house you were more likely to be asked, 'Where were you when you first read 'The Catcher In The Rye?
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His characters are ravaged, beaten. They walk through infernos and emerged charred doves.
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Good bands you can kind of lose, then come back and realize they're still good.
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To be next to her was to have everything.
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God, the boring relative everyone ignores--no one calls, no one writes--until they need a serious favor.
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I was aware now, as ever, that between all people there were First Times You See Them and Last Times you See Them.
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