Marisha Pessl Quotes

You meet people, you part ways, sometimes you cross paths again. Mostly, you don't.

The moral is that a career can be gone in an instant. And all you have in this world are the people you love.

The idea of forever is kind of ridiculous, which is unfortunate because it's kind of a nice thing to say, you know. I think it softens the blow of mortality and having to say goodbye to everything you know and everyone you love and all that kind of thing.

There is nothing glamorous about death.

It doesn't matter. What matters is that you're about to die.

Every so often, we all gaze into the abyss. It's a depressing fact of life that eventually the clock expires; eventually the sand in the hourglass runs out. It's the leaving behind of everything that matters to us that hurts the most.

The practice days, the walkthroughs, the bus rides - all those things you can't come back to. When you are getting into Year 15, you think about it. This thing is going to come to an end at some point.

Have you noticed that only in time of illness or disaster or death are people real? I remember at the time of the wreck-- people were so kind and helpful and solid. Everyone pretended that our lives until that moment had been every bit as real as the moment itself and that the future must be real too, when the truth was that our reality had been purchased only by Lyell's death. In another hour or so we had all faded out again and gone our dim ways.

Stations and airports are rehearsals for separations by death.

Life changes, people come and go and seasons never last. Karen kingsbury # Leaving

Life is a train ride, and at the many stations along the route, people important to us debark, never to get aboard again, until by the end of the journey, we sit in a passenger car where most of the seats are empty.

Thus we live, forever taking leave.

Sunsets are loved because they vanish. Flowers are loved because they go. The dogs of the field and the cats of the kitchen are loved because soon they must depart. These are not the sole reasons, but at the heart of morning welcomes and afternoon laughters is the promise of farewell. In the gray muzzle of an old dog we see goodbye. In the tired face of an old friend we read long journeys beyond returns.

The last moments slipped by, one by one, irretrievable.

Nothing can be sadder or more profound than to see a thousand things for the first and last time.

Why, Robert Singh often wondered, did we give our hearts to friends whose life spans are so much shorter than our own?

We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.

Ultimately, you're left with the people you love and who love you- everything else fades into oblivion.

But I'd long ago learned not to be picky in farewells. They weren't guaranteed or promised. You were lucky, more than blessed, if you got a good-bye at all.

What it must feel like, I thought, to look at something, anything really, and know that it’s for the last time?

She was saying goodbye and she didn't even know it.

That's what life is about: People come and go.

What is our life but a succession of preludes to that unknown song whose first solemn note is sounded by death?