Marisha Pessl

To be next to her was to have everything.

— Marisha Pessl

“You want the girl next door? Go next door!”

— Marisha Pessl

“ Everyone smiles for a photograph. ”

— Marisha Pessl

Within every elaborate lie, a kernel of truth.

— Marisha Pessl

…how monstrous the people you loved could be.

— Marisha Pessl

Freak the ferocious out.

— Marisha Pessl

Sovereign. Deadly. Perfect.

— Marisha Pessl

It’s easy to be yourself in the dark.

— Marisha Pessl

Always live your life with your biography in mind.

— Marisha Pessl

Not returning phone calls is the severest form of torture in the civilized world.

— Marisha Pessl

“She was lost now, she'd been silenced- another dead branch on Cordova's warped tree.”

— Marisha Pessl

“To be sensitive is fine, but it makes day-to-day living- life -rather painful.”

— Marisha Pessl

“Mr. Archer being EARTH FRIENDLY was APPARATUS HOSTILE.”

— Marisha Pessl

It’s hard, in America, not to equate ‘happiness’ with ‘things’.

— Marisha Pessl

His characters are ravaged, beaten. They walk through infernos and emerged charred doves.

— Marisha Pessl

Good bands you can kind of lose, then come back and realize they're still good.

— Marisha Pessl

Happiness is a hound dog in the sun. We aren't on Earth to be happy, but to experience incredible things. - Hannah…

— Marisha Pessl

It's a common feeling for people to feel intermittent antipathy toward individuals they're familiar with.

— Marisha Pessl

What, really, was the difference between something hounding you and something leading you somewhere?

— Marisha Pessl

“Could something be real when all evidence of it was gone? Was something categorically true if it lived on only in your…

— Marisha Pessl

“Sometimes people can surprise the hell outta you. Sometimes they can tear your heart out and turn it to putty, can’t they?”

— Marisha Pessl

“It's a terrible thing, to lie. It's a field you keep seeding and watering and plowing, but nothing will ever grow on…

— Marisha Pessl

“Somewhere in a woman's room there is always something, an object, a detail, that is her, wholly and unapologetic.”

— Marisha Pessl

Life was a freight train barreling toward just one stop, our loved ones streaking past our windows in blurs of color and…

— Marisha Pessl

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…

— Marisha Pessl

“But you go through with it, continue to fight, because you hope one day it won’t be like this. Life can be…

— Marisha Pessl

“Grab the work when it comes, my man. Your competition is now a fourteen-year-old in pajamas with the username Truth-ninja-12 who believes…

— Marisha Pessl

When I'm creating characters, I definitely think of theme songs. Writing for me is very visual, so I sometimes think of it…

— Marisha Pessl

“...somewhere, nearby voices filled with dusk, cabs and panhandlers and one drunken girl screeching like a wounded bird - all of it…

— Marisha Pessl

“No wonder so many adults long to return to university, to all those deadlines--ahhh, that structure! Scaffolding to which we may cling!…

— Marisha Pessl

I think every writer has a book that haunts them, and on some level, every book you write is a reaction to…

— Marisha Pessl

I was aware too how strange adults were, how theirs lives were vaster than they wanted anyone to realize, that they actually…

— Marisha Pessl

“As far as one journeys, as much as a man sees, from the turrets of the Taj Mahal to the Siberian wilds,…

— Marisha Pessl

“America's greatest revelation was not the atom bomb, not Fundamentalism, not fat farms, not Elvis, not even the quite astute observation that…

— Marisha Pessl

“The mountains hugged each other sternly, similar to the way men hugged other men, not letting their chests touch. Thin clouds hung…

— Marisha Pessl

“I need to give you one last bit of advice in the off chance this rather extraordinary and enviable situation in which…

— Marisha Pessl

It felt as if we'd been to war together. Deep in a jungle, alone, I had relied on them, these strangers. They'd…

— Marisha Pessl

Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the…

— Marisha Pessl

“The Shadow is what people are hunting throughout the tale. Or else it can dog the hero, refusing to leave him alone.…

— Marisha Pessl

“So I would die in here. I’d leave my little life. I’d barely worn it out. Life had been a suit I’d…

— Marisha Pessl