{"author":"Marisha Pessl","author_id":"Marisha+Pessl","total_quotes":31,"quotes":[{"text":"You'll find that great artists don't love, live, fuck or even die like ordinary people. Because they always have their art. It nourishes them more than any connection to people. Whatever human tragedy befalls them, they're never too gutted, because they need only to pour the tragedy into their vat, stir in the other lurid ingredients, blast it over a fire. What emerges will be even more magnificent than if the tragedy had never occurred.","author":"Marisha Pessl","tags":["art","artists","tragedy"],"id":3308,"author_id":"Marisha+Pessl"},{"text":"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.","author":"Marisha Pessl","tags":["darkness","freedom","imagination","make-believe","reality"],"id":17183,"author_id":"Marisha+Pessl"},{"text":"...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.","author":"Marisha Pessl","tags":["first-love","heathcliff","longing","wal-mart","wuthering-heights"],"id":23465,"author_id":"Marisha+Pessl"},{"text":"She was lost now, she'd been silenced- another dead branch on Cordova's warped tree.","author":"Marisha Pessl","tags":["brilliant","death","horror","metaphor","nature"],"id":25851,"author_id":"Marisha+Pessl"},{"text":"We were up the whole night just talking, walking the city. You can walk those blocks forever, take a break on the edge of the fountain, eat pizza and snow cones, awed by the human carnival all around you.","author":"Marisha Pessl","tags":["city-life","new-york-city","night-film"],"id":36189,"author_id":"Marisha+Pessl"},{"text":"Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last.","author":"Marisha Pessl","tags":["epic","stories"],"id":45567,"author_id":"Marisha+Pessl"},{"text":"I just got another kitten, you know. Found another trademark. It's quite embarrassing I misse.","author":"Marisha Pessl","tags":["cats","conspiracy-theories","crazy-old-man","film"],"id":69360,"author_id":"Marisha+Pessl"},{"text":"Well, it doesn't look good. Makes me look like one of those unloved latchkey children they make after-school specials about.'Don't sell yourself short. You're more Masterpiece Theatre.","author":"Marisha Pessl","tags":["children","fathers","masterpiece-theatre"],"id":87865,"author_id":"Marisha+Pessl"},{"text":"One of my pet peeves was when an adult imagined they had to encapsulate Life for you, hand you Life in a jar, in an eyedropper, in a penguin paperweight full of snow-A Collector's Dream.","author":"Marisha Pessl","tags":["adults","life","life-lessons","patronizing","pet-peeves","teenagers"],"id":126449,"author_id":"Marisha+Pessl"},{"text":"Within every elaborate lie, a kernel of truth.","author":"Marisha Pessl","tags":["exaggeration","honesty","lie","lies","lying","stories","truth"],"id":130965,"author_id":"Marisha+Pessl"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":31,"pages":4,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}