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It was never the act itself but our own understanding of it that defeated us, over and over again.

Marisha Pessl

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Marisha Pessl
Age: 47
Born: 1977
Born: October 26
Writer
Clarkston
Michigan
Defeated
Understanding
Never

More quotes by Marisha Pessl

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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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Mortal fear is as crucial a thing to our lives as love. It cuts to the core of our being and shows us what we are. Will you step back and cover your eyes? Or will you have the strength to walk to the precipice and look out?
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...I couldn't let go of the thought that it had, in fact, been he, restless and moody Heathcliff. Day after day, he floated through all the Wal-Marts in America, searching for me in a million lonely aisles.
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What, really, was the difference between something hounding you and something leading you somewhere?
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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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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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His characters are ravaged, beaten. They walk through infernos and emerged charred doves.
Marisha Pessl
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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.
Marisha Pessl
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God, the boring relative everyone ignores--no one calls, no one writes--until they need a serious favor.
Marisha Pessl
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...the deepest secrets about ourselves that we, in the ultimate act of humanity, will spare those we truly love.
Marisha Pessl
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It's not fair. It's not. But then, that's the game. It makes life great. The fact that it ends when we don't want it to. The ending gives it meaning.
Marisha Pessl
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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.
Marisha Pessl
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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.
Marisha Pessl
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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
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Because every one of us has our box, a dark chamber stowing the thing that lanced our heart. It contains what you do everything for, strive for, wound everything around you.
Marisha Pessl
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Just when you think you've hit rock bottom, you realize you're standing on another trapdoor.
Marisha Pessl
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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.
Marisha Pessl
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Show me what a man hates and I'll show you what he is.
Marisha Pessl
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Making love to Aurelia was like rummaging through a card catalog in a deserted library, searching for one very obscure, little-read entry on Hungarian poetry.
Marisha Pessl
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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?!
Marisha Pessl