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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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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?
Marisha Pessl
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May you walk a lighted path. May you fight for truth - your truth, not someone else's - and may you understand, above all things, that you are the most important concept, theory, and philosophy I have ever known.
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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His characters are ravaged, beaten. They walk through infernos and emerged charred doves.
Marisha Pessl
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It’s got to be some kind of cult. Anyone offers you Kool-Aid or a hot shower, say no.
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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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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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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…how monstrous the people you loved could be.
Marisha Pessl
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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.
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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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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What, really, was the difference between something hounding you and something leading you somewhere?
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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If I scribbled a few words on a cocktail napkin and showed it to my family, they'd proclaim it astonishing and more culturally relevant than the Bible.
Marisha Pessl
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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?
Marisha Pessl
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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.
Marisha Pessl
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Sadly, American teenagers are to a weightless vacuum as seat cushions are to polyurethane foam -
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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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