Quotes by Marisha Pessl

Within every elaborate lie, a kernel of truth.

The store was empty, without a single customer or employee. It appeared in the Internet age, pianos, like physical books, were fast becoming culturally extinct. They’d probably stay that way unless Apple invented the iPiano, which fit inside your pocket and could be mastered via text message. With the iPiano, anyone can be an iMozart. Then, you could compose your own iRequiem for your own iFuneral attended by millions of your iFriends who iLoved you.

Well, life isnt a cakewalk, is it?! Eighty-nine percent of the worlds 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?!

Books give us new lives, loves, and the feeling we arent alone.

A deus ex machina will never appear in real life so you best make other arrangements.

Well, everyone and their grandmother knows shes stillbanging Charles after all these years —Like a screen in a tornado. Sure.

It was true. After our divorce, Id ended up in a slight relationship with my last research assistant, Aurelia Feinstein, age 34-though let me state for the record it was not as hot as it sounded. Making love to Aurelia was like rummaging through a card catalog in a deserted library, searching for one very obscure little red entry on Hungarian poetry. It was dead silent, no one gave me any dierection, and nothing was where it was supposed to be.

Well, it doesnt look good. Makes me look like one of those unloved latchkey children they make after-school specials about.Dont sell yourself short. Youre more Masterpiece Theatre.

How scary and sudden the shift from Living to Dead.

And that fear Id felt, the disembodying confusion, seemed to be a drug I was now addicted to, because moving through the ordinary world- watching CNN, reading the Times, walking to Sant Ambroeus to have a coffee at the bar- made me feel exhausted, even depressed. Perhaps I was suffering from the same problem as the man whod sailed around the world and now on land, facing his farmhouse, his wife and kids, understood that the constancy of home stretching out before him like a dry flat field was infinitely more terrifying than any violent squall with thirty-foot swells.

When it was daylight, wed been sitting on a stoop watching the street get light. She mentioned the light took eight minutes to leave the sun and reach us. You couldnt help but love that light traveling so far through the loneliest of spaces to get here, to come so far. It was like we were the only two people in the world.

There it is,” he’d say reverentially. “The box represents the mysterious threshold between reality and make-believe. [..] 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. And if it were opened, would anything be set free? No. For the impenetrable prison with the impossible lock is your own head.

she was flighty and poor, a French studies major who quoted Simone de Beauvoir. She wiped her runny nose on her coat sleeve when it was snowing, stuck her head out of car windows the way dogs do, the wind fireworking her hair. That woman was gone now. Not that it was her fault. Vast fortunes did that to people. It took them to the cleaners, cruelly starched and steam-pressed them so all their raw edges, all the dirt and hunger and guileless laughter, were ironed out. Few survived real money.

I’m not afraid of total failure. In the end, we’re all just food for worms, so what are we so worried about?

If I learned anything about her it was that she lived with a vehemence most of us never have the courage for. Banks tells me. But there was something about her that precluded an ordinary existence. In some ways, Im not surprised shes dead. A job, husband, kids, a beach house? That wasnt her. I cant explain why, except she was more like a force that whipped through life, defying logic, scaring you, even hurting you because she was everything you wanted to be, but you knew youd never have the guts - and then she was gone. That was my experience with Ashley Cordova.

I remembered what Dad said once, that some people have all of lifes answers worked out the day theyre born and theres no use trying to teach them anything new. Theyre closed for business even though, somewhat confusingly, their doors open at eleven, Monday through Friday, Dad said. And the trying to change what they think, the attempt to explain, the hope theyll come to see your side of things, it was exhausting, because it never made a dent and afterward you only ached unbearably.

There was something about her playing... a knowledge of darkness in the most extreme form.

As much as some people would like to believe, for their own peace of mind, that the appearance of evil in this world had a clean cause, the truth was never that simple.

She was lost now, shed been silenced- another dead branch on Cordovas warped tree.

I couldnt help but suspect something hed seen or encountered had changed his view of what had happened between them. It had somehow set him free. And hed let it fly, that gorgeous blackbird of a love hed been keeping in a cage. What was it like for him, every day standing outside in the wind and rain to stare at the ocean, yearning for some sign of her, never giving up hope? At The Peak perhaps shed finally come into view, a ship coming neither toward him nor away, only riding that perfect line between heaven and earth, long enough for him to know that she had loved him, that what they had was real, before slipping out of sight, probably forever.