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She Told Me Her Father Taught Her To Live Life Way Beyond The Cusp Of It, Way Out In The Outer Reaches Where Most People Never Had The Guts To Go, Where You Got Hurt. Where There Was Unimaginable Beauty And Pain ... They Were Always Reminding Themselves To Stop Measuring Life In Coffee Spoons, Mornings And Afternoons, To Keep Swimming Way, Way Down To The Bottom Of The Ocean To Find Where The Mermaids Sang, Each To Each. Where There Was Danger And Beauty And Light. Only The Now.

-Marisha Pessl

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She Told Me Her

Marisha Pessl

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She Told Me Her Father Taught Her To Live Life Way Beyond The Cusp Of It, Way Out In The Outer Reaches Where Most People Never Had The Guts To Go, Where You Got Hurt. Where There Was Unimaginable Beauty And Pain ... They Were Always Reminding Themselves To Stop Measuring Life In Coffee Spoons, Mornings And Afternoons, To Keep Swimming Way, Way Down To The Bottom Of The Ocean To Find Where The Mermaids Sang, Each To Each. Where There Was Danger And Beauty And Light. Only The Now.

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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.

…deep-diving Love, A Love That Excavates You. It’s Something You Have To Have Before You Die In Order To Have Lived.

It’s Hard, In America, Not To Equate ‘happiness’ With ‘things’.

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.

When I'm Creating Characters, I Definitely Think Of Theme Songs. Writing For Me Is Very Visual, So I Sometimes Think Of It In Terms Of A Movie With A Soundtrack, And Try To Transfer That To Words.

Life Was A Freight Train Barreling Toward Just One Stop, Our Loved Ones Streaking Past Our Windows In Blurs Of Color And Light. There Was No Holding On To Any Of It, And No Slowing It Down.

I Was Aware Now, As Ever, That Between All People There Were First Times You See Them And Last Times You See Them.

What, Really, Was The Difference Between Something Hounding You And Something Leading You Somewhere?

I Hate How The People Who Really Get You Are The Ones You Can Never Hold On To For Very Long. And The Ones Who Don’t Understand You At All Stick Around.

People Had An Illogical, Self-serving Rationale When It Came To Interpreting The Behavior Of Others.

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.

Sadly, American Teenagers Are To A Weightless Vacuum As Seat Cushions Are To Polyurethane Foam -

When You Grow Up--and From The Look Of Things, You Have Awhile--but You Learn Things Never Go Back To Normal Simply Because Everyone's Sorry. Sorry Is Ridiculous.

Life Had Been A Suit I'd Only Put On For Special Occasions. Most Of The Time I Kept It In The Back Of My Closet, Forgetting It Was There. We Were Meant To Die When It Was Barely Stitched Anymore, When The Elbows And Knees Were Stained With Grass And Mud, Shoulder Pads Uneven From People Hugging You All The Time, Downpours And Blistering Sun, The Fabric Faded, Buttons Gone.

Just When You Think You've Hit Rock Bottom, You Realize You're Standing On Another Trapdoor.

I Haven't Always Been A Writer And I Suppose I Tiptoed Around The Idea Of Writing Full Time, Because It's So Isolating.

It Was Never The Act Itself But Our Own Understanding Of It That Defeated Us, Over And Over Again.

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.

Betrayal Isn't Ridiculous. It's The Reason Empires Fall.

People Don’t Realize How Easy Life Is To Change. You Just Get On The Bus.

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?!

It Was As If Hannah Had Sprung A Leak And Her Character, Usually So Meticulous And Contained, Was Spilling All Over The Place.

The Late Great Horace Lloyd Swithin (1844-1917), British Essayist, Lecturer, Satirist, And Social Observer, Wrote In His Autobiographical Appointments, 1890-1901 (1902), "when One Travels Abroad, One Doesn't So Much Discover The Hidden Wonders Of The World, But The Hidden Wonders Of The Individuals With Whom One Is Traveling. They May Turn Out To Afford A Stirring View, A Rather Dull Landscape, Or A Terrain So Treacherous One Finds It's Best To Forget The Entire Affair And Return Home.

It’s What We Chase But Never Find. It Is The Mystery Of Our Lives, The Understanding That Even When We Have Everything We Want It Is One Day To Leave Us. It’s The Something Unseen, The Lurking Devastation, The Darkness That Gives Our Lives Dimension.

But When You Flee Someone, No Matter How Far You Roam, That Person Will Follow You As Doggedly As The Stars.

It's A Common Feeling For People To Feel Intermittent Antipathy Toward Individuals They're Familiar With.

I Hate To Think Of A Day Where A Compelling Book Or A Compelling Authorial Voice Would Be Lost Simply Because That Person Doesn't Have A Web Site. But I Think That, To Use The Internet In A Positive Way, To Turn People On To Reading, Is Something That Authors Shouldn't Really Shy Away From Necessarily.

Most People Ended Up, After Only A Couple Of Months, So Far Away From Where They'd Intended To Go, Stuck In Some Barbed Underbrush Of A Quagmire When They'd Meant To Head Straight To The Ocean.

Dad Always Warned That It Was Misleading When One Imagined People, When One Sas Them In The Mind's Eye, Because One Never Remembered Them As They Really Were, With As Many Inconsistencies As There Were Hairs On A Human Head (100,000 To 200,000). Instead, The Mind Used A Lazy Shorthand, Smoothed The Person Over Into Their Most Dominating Characteristic--their Pessimism Or Insecurity (something Really Being Lazy, Turning Them Into Either Nice Or Mean)--and One Made The Mistake Of Judging Them From This Basis Alone And Risked, On A Subsequent Encounter, Being Dangerously Surprised.

We're Living Longer, We Social Network Alone With Our Screens, And Our Depth Of Feeling Gets Shallower. Soon It'll Be Nothing But A Tide Pool, Then A Thimble Of Water, Then A Micro Drop.

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.

Within Every Elaborate Lie, A Kernel Of Truth.

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.

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?

I'm Not Afraid Of Total Failure. In The End, We're All Just Food For Worms, So What Are We So Worried About?

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.

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Freak The Ferocious Out.

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Sovereign. Deadly. Perfect.

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...the Deepest Secrets About Ourselves That We, In The Ultimate Act Of Humanity, Will Spare Those We Truly Love.

You Journalists Bulldoze Life's Mysteries, Ignorant Of What You're So Ruthlessly Turning Up.

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To Be Next To Her Was To Have Everything.

She Told Me Her Father Taught Her To Live Life Way Beyond The Cusp Of It, Way Out In The Outer Reaches Where Most People Never Had The Guts To Go, Where You Got Hurt. Where There Was Unimaginable Beauty And Pain ... They Were Always Reminding Themselves To Stop Measuring Life In Coffee Spoons, Mornings And Afternoons, To Keep Swimming Way, Way Down To The Bottom Of The Ocean To Find Where The Mermaids Sang, Each To Each. Where There Was Danger And Beauty And Light. Only The Now.

But Most Critically, Sweet, Never Try To Change The Narrative Structure Of Someone Else's Story, Though You Will Certainly Be Tempted To, As You Watch Those Poor Souls In School, In Life, Heading Unwittingly Down Dangerous Tangents, Fatal Digressions From Which They Will Unlikely Be Able To Emerge. Resist The Temptation. Spend Your Energies On Your Story. Reworking It. Making It Better.

Narrative Structure

Happiness Is A Hound Dog In The Sun. We Aren't On Earth To Be Happy, But To Experience Incredible Things. - Hannah Schneider

It Felt As If We'd Been To War Together. Deep In A Jungle, Alone, I Had Relied On Them, These Strangers. They'd Held Me Up In Ways Only People Could. When It Was Over, An Ending Never Felt Like An Ending, Only An Exhausted Draw, We Went Our Separate Ways. Be We Were Bonded Forever By The History Of It, The Simple Fact They'd Seen The Raw Side Of Me And Me Of Them, A Side No One, Not Even Closest Friends Or Family Had Ever Seen Before, Or Probably Ever Would.

Sometimes It Takes More Courage Not To Let Yourself See. Sometimes Knowledge Is Damaging - Not Enlightenment But Enleadenment.

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It Was What Accidental Deaths Did To People, Made Everybody's Sea Floor Irregular And Uneven, Causing Tidal Currents To Collide, Surge Upward, Thereby Resulting In Small Yet Volatile Eddies Churning At Everybody's Surface. (in The More Dangerous Cases, It Created A Lasting Whirlpool In Which The Strongest Swimmers Could Drown.)

His Characters Are Ravaged, Beaten. They Walk Through Infernos And Emerged Charred Doves.

Man's Wobbly Little Mind Isn't Equipped For Hauling Around The Great Unknowns. Very Few People Realize, There's No Point Chasing After Answers To Life's Important Questions. They All Have Fickle, Highly Whimsical Minds Of Their Own. Nevertheless. If You're Patient, If You Don't Rush Them, When They're Ready, They'll Smash Into You. And Don't Be Surprised If Afterward You're Speechless And There Are Cartoon Tweety Birds Chirping Around Your Head. (gareth Van Meer)

Such Things As Anguish, Woe, Affliction, Guilt, Feelings Of Awfulness, And Utter Wretchedness, The Bread And Butter Of Days Of Yore And Russians, Sadly Have Very Little Staying Power In These Lickety-split Modern Times.

It’s Easy To Be Yourself In The Dark.

It’s Got To Be Some Kind Of Cult. Anyone Offers You Kool-aid Or A Hot Shower, Say No.

Look At Picasso. O’neill. Tennessee Williams. Capote. Were These Shiny Happy People Spreading Sunshine? No. Only The Greatest Of Personal Demons Can Force You To Do Powerful Work.

Good Bands You Can Kind Of Lose, Then Come Back And Realize They're Still Good.

Some People Are As Fragile As Butterflies And Sensitive And It’s Your Responsibility Not To Destroy Them. Just Because You Can

There Was Quantum Mechanics, String Theory, And Then There Was The Most Mind-bending Frontier Of The Natural World, Women.

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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.

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.

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Always Live Your Life With Your Biography In Mind.

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.

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.

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.

He Said You Couldn't Pretend The Terrible Things In Life Didn't Happen. You Can't Clean It Up. You Keep All The Refuse And The Scars. It's How You Learn. And Try To Make Improvements.

For Every Man There Exists Bait He Cannot Resist Swallowing.

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.

... Suddenly I Was A Kid In The Hall Standing Outside My Locker About To Head To Math. But That Was How It Went Sometimes, The English Language, When You Really Needed It, Crumbled To Clay In Your Mouth. That's When All The Real Things Were Said.

Show Me What A Man Hates And I'll Show You What He Is.

Occasionally When I'm Procrastinating Writing, I'll While Away The Hours On Itunes. You Can Just Keep Going Forever And Find These Bands You'd Never Normally Hear Of.

I Was Aware Too How Strange Adults Were, How Theirs Lives Were Vaster Than They Wanted Anyone To Realize, That They Actually Stretched On And On Like Deserts, Dry And Desolate, With An Unpredictable, Shifting Sea Of Dunes.

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