Neverworld Wake Quotes

“We are all anthologies. We are each thousands of pages long, filled with fairy tales and poetry, mysteries and tragedy, forgotten stories in the back no one will ever read.”
― Marisha Pessl, Neverworld Wake

“Life does not belong to you. It is the apartment you rent. Love without fear, for love is an airplane that carries you to new lands. There is a universe in silence. A tunnel to peace in a scream. Get a good night's sleep. Laugh when you can. You are more magical than you know. Take your advice from the elderly and children. None of it as crucial as you think, but that makes it no less vital. Our lives go on, and on. Look for the breadcrumbs.”
― Marisha Pessl, Neverworld Wake

“I saw very little as it truly was. But that was what Martha taught me. We swear we see each other, but all we are ever able to make out is a tiny porthole view of an ocean. We think we remember the past as it was, but our memories are as fantastic and flimsy as dreams. It's so easy to hate the pretty one, worship the genius, love the rock star, trust the good girl.

That's never their only story.

We are all anthologies. We are each thousands of pages long, filled with fairy tales and poetry, mysteries and tragedy, forgotten stories in the back no one will ever read.

The most we can do is hold out our hands and help each other across the unknown. For in our held hands we find pathways through the dark, across jungles and cities, bridges suspended over the deepest caverns of this world. Your friends will walk with you, holding on with all their might, even when they're no longer there.”
― Marisha Pessl, Neverworld Wake

“Look around. It's almost gone.
If only someone had told me that before. About life. If only I had understood.”
― Marisha Pessl, Neverworld Wake

“We swear we see each other, but all we are ever able to make out is a tiny porthole view of an ocean. We think we remember the past as it was, but our memories are as fantastic and flimsy as dreams. It's so easy to hate the pretty one, worship the genius, love the rock star, trust the good girl.

That's never their only story.

We are all anthologies. We are each thousands of pages long, filled with fairy tales and poetry, mysteries and tragedy, forgotten stories in the back no one will ever read.”
― Marisha Pessl, Neverworld Wake

“The body shuts down when it’s too sad,” said my dad.”
― Marisha Pessl, Neverworld Wake

“Those were the best nights of my life. I couldn’t say why, exactly, this was so—only that I knew that as an old woman, when I thought back to my youth, I’d remember these nights, sitting with these five people along the harrowing window ledge of the Foreman’s Lookout, gazing into that clear blue lake hundreds of feet below. Our friendship was born there. There we were bound together. Something about seeing each other against that spare, alien backdrop of rock, water, and sky—not to mention the prohibited, dangerous thing we were doing—it X-rayed us, revealed the unspoken questions we each were asking. You could feel life burning us, our scars as real as the wind whipping our faces. We knew that nothing would ever be the same, that youth was here and nearly gone already, that love was fragile and death was real.”
― Marisha Pessl, Neverworld Wake

“He chose you because a plain setting makes the diamond sparkle brighter.”
― Marisha Pessl, Neverworld Wake

“We swear we see each other, but all we are ever able to make out is a tiny porthole view of an ocean. We think we remember the past, but our memories are as fantastic and flimsy as dreams. It's so easy to hate the pretty one, worship the genius, love the rockstar, trust the good girl. That's never their only story.”
― Marisha Pessl, Neverworld Wake

“Love is this elusive bird," he said. "You're the lifelong bird-watcher, looking for this rare red-plumed quail people spend entire lives trying to see for three seconds in a cherry tree on a mountaintop in Japan."

"You're mistaking love for perfection," I said. "Real love when it's there? It's just there. It's a metal folding chair.”
― Marisha Pessl, Neverworld Wake

“I was a ticking clock in a timeless world”
― Marisha Pessl, Neverworld Wake

“Why would I waste time—a highly precious, constantly diminishing resource—on transitory neurological fluctuations of adrenaline, dopamine, and serotonin?”
― Marisha Pessl, Neverworld Wake

“She [Whitley] was the only girl I knew who surveyed everyone like a leather-clad Dior model and rattled off Latin like it was her native language.”
― Marisha Pessl, Neverworld Wake

“That was just how Jim was. He saturated. He overflowed. He drowned".”
― Marisha Pessl, Neverworld Wake

“You're mistaking love for perfection," I said. "Real love when it's there? It's just there. It's a metal folding chair.”
― Marisha Pessl, Neverworld Wake

“It’s the final countdown,’ ” he sang,”
― Marisha Pessl, Neverworld Wake

“Without time, nothing had meaning. Never before had I understood how crucial the passage of time was to caring about something. It gave it an expiry date, a wick, a rush, a burn. Without it, everything sat in place, dumbly waiting. In”
― Marisha Pessl, Neverworld Wake

“We are all anthologies. We are each thousands of pages long, filled with fairy tales and poetry, mysteries and tragedy, forgotten stories in the back no one will ever read.
The most we can do is hold out our hands and help each other across the unknown. For in our held hands we find pathways through the dark, across jungles and cities; bridges suspended over the deepest caverns of this world. Your friends will walk with you, holding on with all their might, even when they're no longer there.”
― Marisha Pessl, Neverworld Wake

“It was stupid. One of those dark spells of loneliness that I thought meant everything. Little did I know, it meant nothing. These monumental moments of our childhood, they’re just one bend in the river, a tight curve filled with boulders so you can’t see beyond. The river roars on across distances we can’t even imagine. I was about to jump when I heard someone coming. It surprised me, so I hesitated, threw myself on the couch, grabbed some random book, pretending to read. You came in, and you saved my life. So here, in the Neverworld, I had to save yours.”
― Marisha Pessl, Neverworld Wake

“You have to design your life like it’s a fresh America. An unseen brave new world sits before you. Every. Single. Day. What are you going to do about it?”
― Marisha Pessl, Neverworld Wake

“Mostly I thought of Martha, who she was and what she had done for me. There wasn’t a moment of my life that I didn’t owe to her. Sometimes it rendered me listless and sad, made me say no to the frat party, the Sunday-night pizza feast, the Spring Fling, and I’d hole up alone in my dorm, drawing or writing lyrics, left with the painful truth of it, how the people who change us are the ones we never saw clearly at all, not until they were gone.”
― Marisha Pessl, Neverworld Wake

“Look around. It’s almost gone. If only someone had told me that before. About life. If only I had understood.”
― Marisha Pessl, Neverworld Wake

“He was, after all, Darrow’s rock star, its heartthrob-musical-genius-Shakespeare, the boy who made spontaneous rapping, poetry, and wearing tweed caps cool (all small miracles unto themselves)—the kid everyone loved, longed for, yet simultaneously wished dead. He had it. An energy force field.”
― Marisha Pessl, Neverworld Wake

“You’re a Dusky Flying Fox,” he told me. “A what?” “An extinct species of mammal known only by a single specimen. You were spotted once in 1874 on Percy Island off the coast of Queensland, Australia. No other examples of you were ever found.”
― Marisha Pessl, Neverworld Wake

“But here I would cite the philosophy of M. Scott Peck. In all groups there are four stages. Pseudocommunity. Chaos. Emptiness. And true community.”
― Marisha Pessl, Neverworld Wake

“Clearly she’d figured out a way to hook him, captivate him with some high-level question about group dynamics or a detail mined from his own papers that served as the magic key to Open Sesame the close connection, the meeting of like minds. When they finally emerged, Beloroda—an elfin man with a turned-up nose and an overmanicured inky beard like a Rorschach test—was beaming at Martha (now hauling a pile of textbooks he’d given her, as well as a legal pad covered with notes), bewitched by the sudden appearance of such an engaging new student.”
― Marisha Pessl, Neverworld Wake

“I Googled the name. Arnold Winwood Beloroda. He was an award-winning psychiatrist and professor emeritus specializing in group dynamic theory. He taught a host of classes at Brown. Making Ethical Decisions: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The Psychology of Manipulation and Consent. The Fantasy of Free Will. A senior seminar, Laboratory for Experiments in Social Persuasion. He had published thirteen nonfiction books, winning a slew of awards for one from the nineties, Heroes and Villains. According to the Wall Street Journal, it was about “the master-slave dynamics of concentration camps” and other situations in which “a large populace allows themselves to be controlled by a select few.”
― Marisha Pessl, Neverworld Wake

“Two: there was no car in the driveway, so the question of how he’d come here without an umbrella yet remained perfectly dry hung in the air, vaguely alarming, like a faint odor of gas.”
― Marisha Pessl, Neverworld Wake

“He could barely open his eyes. 'Hello? You there, God? It's me Judy.'
'Kipling. Can you hear me?'
'I'd like to order room service, please. I'd like the spaghetti Bolognese.'
He rolled off the raft into the pool, sinking. I pulled off my shoes and raincoat and dove after him, finding him drifting motionless along the bottom. Madly I kicked back to the surface.
'Kipling! Can you hear me?"
"'It's the final countdown,'" He sang, his eyes slits.
I was the lone nurse working in a madhouse.”
― Marisha Pessl, Neverworld Wake

“The mind does its best to lessen the impact of any catastrophe. It really tries its best. But then the distance between reality and woven fantasy becomes too great for even the mind to bear. All those words of calm and relief, the hope that everything will be all right in the end, can’t help stretching and tearing and fading to nothing. Then you wake up screaming.”
― Marisha Pessl, Neverworld Wake