It's kind of funny...the moments on which life hinges. I think growing up you always imagine your life--your success--depends on your family and how much money they have, where you go to college, what sort of job you can pin down, starting salary...But it doesn't, you know. You wouldn't believe this, but life hinges on a couple of seconds you never see coming. And what you decide in those few seconds determines everything from then on... And you have no idea what you'll do until you're there...
Marisha PesslDad 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.
Marisha PesslThe 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.
Marisha PesslThough blessed with the enviable properties of a mink coat—graceful, unreasonable, and impractical no matter what she was draped over—she was nevertheless one of those people whose personality proved to be the bane of modern mathematicians. She was neither a flat nor solid shape. She showed no symmetry at all. Trigonometry, Calculus and Statistics all proved useless. Her Pie Chart was a muddle of arbitrary wedges, her Line Graph, the silhouette of the Alps. And just when one listed her under Chaos Theory—Butterfly Effects, Weather Predictions, Fractals, Bifurcation diagrams and whatnot—she showed up as an equilateral triangle, sometimes even a square.
Marisha PesslTags: identity
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. Increasing the scale, the depth of content, the universal themes. And I don't care what those themes are- they're yours to uncover and stand behind-so long as, at the very least, there is courage.
Marisha PesslDad's romances could last anywhere between a platypus egg incubation (19-21 days) and a squirrel pregnancy (24-45 days).
Marisha PesslTags: humourous
All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and when it comes to the Holiday Season, happy families can abruptly become unhappy and unhappy families can, to their great alarm, be happy
Marisha PesslTags: humor
I thus concluded, with the same awe of Jane Goodall discovering the chimpanzees’ nimble use of tools to extract termites, it really wasn’t so much the tragic event itself, but others having knowledge of it that prevented recovery.
Marisha PesslDad always said a person must have a magnificent reason for writing out his or her Life Story and expecting anyone to read it.
Unless your name is something along the lines of Mozart, Matisse, Churchill, Che Guevara or Bond - James Bond - you best spent your free time finger painting or playing shuffeboard, for no one, with the exception of your flabby-armed mother with stiff hair and a mashed potato way of looking at you, will want to hear the particulars of your pitiable existence, which doubtlessly will end as it began - with a wheeze.
Is there anything more glorious than a professor? Forget about his molding the minds, the future of a nation - a dubious assertion; there's little you can do when they tend to emerge from the womd predestined for Grand Theft Auto Vice City.
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