Marisa De Los Santos Quotes & Sayings

Whatever word you use to describe diving into the deepest part of a human. Take your pick; they're all woefully inadequate, but they're also all we have. — Marisa De Los Santos

I've always found allegories kind of comforting. When you encounter people named Liar and Abstinence, you might not be crazy about them, but you know exactly what you're getting into. — Marisa De Los Santos

If you stay in it for any length of time, like anyplace else, a cafe becomes a world. — Marisa De Los Santos

Inside plum trees stood in a row, flowers lifted their pale throats to the moon and stars, a magnolia held its tight-closed buds like white candles in its green hands. — Marisa De Los Santos

I think there are certain people who change the way time moves. — Marisa De Los Santos

Maybe she would remember who he was, and maybe she would come back. — Marisa De Los Santos

Soldiers in the heat of battle; death-row prisoners; explorers stranded in deserts, jungles, on mountaintops; anyone sick or lost or just tired and bewildered: we all wanted our mothers. — Marisa De Los Santos

A real life doesn't mean getting what you want; the achievement, the privilege, too is knowing what you love. — Marisa De Los Santos

There's a kind of holiness to love, requited or not, and those people who don't receive it with gratitude are arrogant beyond saving. — Marisa De Los Santos

Sometimes, happiness feels so fragile ... So what do we do about it? ... Live. Forget that it's fragile. Live like it isn't — Marisa De Los Santos

All is one and all is different. — Marisa De Los Santos

When it comes to Clare, sometimes, the past isn't past. The past can get as present as any present ever was, so near that I feel its breath. — Marisa De Los Santos

In my experience, people love what they love. They just do. — Marisa De Los Santos

If you're going to rip someone off, it might as well be Audrey Hepburn. — Marisa De Los Santos

Like love was a habit you couldn't break. — Marisa De Los Santos

Chicken Soup for the Soul". You've heard of these books, am I right? We've all heard of them. But I wonder if you're aware of just how many "Chicken Soup" books exist on the planet. No offense, but I doubt it. I doubt it because in the time it would take you to come up with a number, the number would have become obsolete. Even as you read this, in some quiet, fecund place, another "Chicken Soup" book is being born. — Marisa De Los Santos

Clare concentrated on the words trying hard to press them into her memory and wishing they were solid objects that she could keep and carry around with her. — Marisa De Los Santos

Still Dev missed him. Not all the time or even very often, but now and then, missing would hit Dev, throw him off balance, a sudden, undeniable ache to know his father, how his voice sounded, what his face did when he read the paper or looked at his son. And the missing wasn't fair; it wasn't earned. In fact, the missing, the searching, the imagining were so unfair that when you put them all together, they looked a lot like betrayal. — Marisa De Los Santos

I have lost things I will never stop missing. — Marisa De Los Santos

There are people whose deaths make you ache with sadness. And then there are people whose deaths prevent the sun from rising, deaths that turn the walls black in every room you walk through, deaths that send storm clouds and a wail swirling through your head so that you can't hear music and you can't recognize your furniture or your own face in the mirror. — Marisa De Los Santos

My life - my real life - started when a man walked into it, a handsome stranger in a perfectly cut suit, and, yes I know how that sounds. — Marisa De Los Santos

Yes, it's true, what I said earlier: A real life doesn't mean geting what you want; the achievement, the privilege, too, is knowing what you love.But getting what you love? Having what you love love you back? Oh, my friend, it's miracle: your one tiny life's head-on collision with divinity. — Marisa De Los Santos

But I've always been a sucker for externals alone: the shape, the shine, what the surface suggests to my palm. So mechanically disinclined it's verging on criminal, I never understood the beauty of an object's workings until Linny sat my reluctant self down one day and showed me her camera. Within fifteen minutes, I had fallen hard for the whole gadgety, eyelike nature of the thing: a tiny piece of glass slowing, bending, organizing light - light - into your grandmother, the Grand Canyon, the begonia on the windowsill, the film keeping the image like a secret. Grandmother, canyon, begonia tucked neatly into the sleek black box, like bugs in a jar. My mind boggled. — Marisa De Los Santos

What do you do when you're in love with the last man in the world you can have? You plan a life, a real life, without him. — Marisa De Los Santos

In my family I have comrades-hearty and loyal-when what I need are intimates, and I've never figured out how to get us all to make the switch. I've never found a way in. — Marisa De Los Santos

Honestly, William, time?' his mother had snapped. 'Distance? Those things have nothing whatsoever to do with love. Who knows that better than you? — Marisa De Los Santos

When he looked up, he said, "Clare told me about Christmas." And I swear the boy's face began to shine. I recognized what I saw there: that a person's name could be infinitely precious, that just saying it could make you feel singled out for glory. — Marisa De Los Santos

Conversationally, we were Fred and Ginger
spin, slide, shuffle, bend. — Marisa De Los Santos

In certain situations, you can't worry about how people will react. You just hyave to be as honest as you can and let what happens afterward happen. — Marisa De Los Santos

You know what I mean. That moment in a relationship in which, at the same time you discover you've been floating in air for 5 and 1/2 weeks you also discover that your feet have dropped a little closer to earth. — Marisa De Los Santos

You know what he said? He said that being away from me is less like being away from a person than being away from other people is. I don't know anyone else who would say something like that. And he was right. When we were apart, I missed him all the time, but he didn't feel faraway. He felt closer than the kids at school. ...
Certain people are like that, I guess. They're together no matter where they are. They just belong to each other. — Marisa De Los Santos

We were friends. It was as big a deal as being in love." She tried to think of a way to make Amelie understand. "It was a revelation, being friends like that. God, it was holy to me. But it wasn't being in love. — Marisa De Los Santos

I can't stand lies. Probably no one can. Probably everyone is, to varying degrees, allergic to them, both spiritually and physically. Lies make me feel low and ignoble, and also itchy, like there's sand under my skin. The only thing that feels worse than hearing a lie is telling one. — Marisa De Los Santos

People in love feel that way all the time, like they don't know what they've done to deserve each other. — Marisa De Los Santos

I don't think love is blind, but wanting to be in love, that's probably blind. — Marisa De Los Santos

I spoke, I listened, and my heart broke, which is to say that it didn't break at all but became suddenly aware of its own wholeness in such a way it hurt like hell. — Marisa De Los Santos

I stand here on this spring day in the center of my life. Chaos, din, and beauty. For a moment, I am still. — Marisa De Los Santos

Magic can happen in a car, a warm, intimate magic born of being in an enclosed, particular place and, simultaneously, being nowhere, passing throu. No one leaves her troubles behind, not really, but you can believe you have. You can believe you're in an inbetween space where trouble can't find you ... — Marisa De Los Santos

Instead, she sat there, smiling that small, small inscrutable smile, like Mona Lisa herself, although I must say that until that moment, I'd never found Mona Lisa's smile particularly interesting or even particularly a smile. Looking at Lake, I understood what probably everyone else already knows about the woman in that painting: we are drawn to her not because of what the smile gives us but because it gives us nothing. We are waiting to get past the smile. We are waiting
we've spent centuries waiting
for the woman to speak. — Marisa De Los Santos

No one is ever quite ready; everyone is always caught off guard. Parenthood chooses you. And you open your eyes, look at what you've got, say "Oh, my gosh," and recognize that of all the balls there ever were, this is the one you should not drop. It's not a question of choice. — Marisa De Los Santos

But some things, no matter how unlikely, are just supposed to happen. You know what I mean. Some things just smack of the future and feel part of an overarching rightness. — Marisa De Los Santos

But every time, what brought me to my senses was my conviction that before a person dropped a new life into this world, she should probably get a real one herself. — Marisa De Los Santos

Soon, the two of them would leave this spot ... walk into the house and into a whole changed world ... — Marisa De Los Santos

He smiled the kind of smile that is the reason for wars and poetry. — Marisa De Los Santos

It's a well-known fact. All women are clinically insane, but especially ballet dancers. Psycho. extremely psycho. Trust me. — Marisa De Los Santos

Since you left there's been a you-shaped space beside me, all the time. It never goes away. — Marisa De Los Santos

As Will stood watching Pen, just before he turned away, his initial astonishment shifted into something quieter. Soon, she will see me; we'll sit someplace and talk, he thought. He felt like a kid who falls asleep on a long car trip, wakes up, and looks out the window to find that he's in a new place, or home, and that it's morning. — Marisa De Los Santos

What's killing him is the idea that I will die unhappy, in a miserable marriage. He hates that my life isn't ending on a good note ... So I told him that he's a good man and was the love of my life, both of which are true. I tried to tell him all the things I hadn't told him before ... Mostly, I wanted him to understand the real reason I'd thought our marriage was over. It was over because we forgot to stay in love. Both of us. — Marisa De Los Santos

We talked and talked and talked. Maybe love comes in at the eyes, but not nearly as much as it comes in at the ears, at least in my experience. As we talked, lights flicked on inside my head; by the end of the night I was a planterium. — Marisa De Los Santos

It's just that without wanting to or trying to - and for years I was deliberately trying not to - I held on to love. Or it held on to me. Not active love; not love, the verb form. It was more just there, a small, unshakable thing, leftover, useless, as vestigial as wisdom teeth or a tailbone, but still potent enough so that when I heard his voice on the phone, my heart gave a tiny jump of hope that made me want to slap it. — Marisa De Los Santos

If you never share the worst thing you've ever done with a single person, if you just carry it all by yourself, maybe it comes between you and everyone you meet, even if it's years later. — Marisa De Los Santos

The sight made her ache. How can I not touch you? she thought hopelessly, and then she was doing it, her fingers on his wrist. He didn't jump or even look at her, just stopped writing. Neither one of them moved, nothing moved, and the whole thing lasted three or four seconds at most, but when Pen took her hand away and started to breathe again, her chest hurt, as though she had been holding her breath for a very long time. — Marisa De Los Santos

She found that if she paid extremely careful attention to what was around her, really concentrating, and noticing every detail, the terror would fall back. — Marisa De Los Santos

Its hard to say what was happening inside her head. Her brain doesn't function quite like most people's to begin with and maybe, under a lot of stress, she just lost the ability to hope.
Dev pondered this, hope as an ability.
I guess that's what's so hard for me to get to, the no hope. To think that, of all the potential scenarios out there, there's not a single good one? It just seems like we- as human beings- know so much, but its nothing compared to what we don't know. The universe surprises us, right? That's just what it does. So how could she be so one hundred percent positive that nothing good would happen? — Marisa De Los Santos

But sometimes, a boat needs to rock; a boat needs to head straight for the heart of a storm and come out on the other side, weather beaten but with flags flying. — Marisa De Los Santos

The examples seemed to fall into two categories: girls who used sweetness and girls who used pluck. — Marisa De Los Santos

It's ok to feel happy, right? She hoped he'd know what she meant. — Marisa De Los Santos

If I were to ever have a full-fledged vocation, as opposed to a half-assed avocation, I needed to love it and, in my experience, it isn't always easy to figure out what you love. — Marisa De Los Santos

Everything turned on the word "we", a synonym for love, the thing that saves us all. — Marisa De Los Santos

I know how syrupy this sounds, how dull, provincial, and possibly whitewashed, but what can I do? Happy childhoods happen — Marisa De Los Santos

Jimmy Stewart is always and indisputably the best man in the world, unless Cary Grant should happen to show up. — Marisa De Los Santos

All those films in which the woman doesn't get her man, those films of yearning unsatisfied, hearts unappeased. You like them; I've liked them too. But I'll tell you what: try belonging body and soul to a man who will never belong to you; see how well you like those films then. "Don't ask for the moon-we have the stars!" ... "Pardon me saying so, but fuck the fucking stars! — Marisa De Los Santos

Happiness isn't what happens when you whistle along, pretending bad things don't exist ... Happiness is earned, like everything else. It's achieved. — Marisa De Los Santos

That no matter what happens, loving someone to the best of your ability is the right thing to do. It's the only thing to do. — Marisa De Los Santos

To understand that you have blown it, that you can never fix it is one of the worst feelings ever. — Marisa De Los Santos

Linney moves in the world with such firm, certain steps, being with her can make you forget your own confusion, at least for a little while. — Marisa De Los Santos

You mustn't let men drive you to mangling the English language, no matter how sweet they are. — Marisa De Los Santos

He wasn't looking at her, was at such an oblique angle to her that his face was little more than a sliver, but she knew him at once. "It was like reading," she would try to explain later, and she wasn't talking about phonics. She didn't break him into syllables - shoulders, hair, shirt collar, hand, nose, cheekbone - and put him back together again; she didn't sound him out. He was a language she knew, and it was whole-word recognition: Will. — Marisa De Los Santos

There were people who could live on their own and be happy, and then there were people like Pen and Margaret who needed the falling together, the daily work of giving and taking and talk and touch. — Marisa De Los Santos

She's the main character in her story, just like I'm the main character in mine. — Marisa De Los Santos

Pen realized it: Sometimes there is nothing to do but surrender yourself to wonder ... You must stop measuring - over and over - the line between loving and being in love. You must offer yourself, whole, to the cobalt starfish (and the orange one and the pale pink one and the biscuit-colored one with the raised, chocolate-brown art deco design) and to the clear, clear water and to the sweep of shining sky and to the silver scattershot of leaping fish (an entire school skipping across the ocean like a stone.) — Marisa De Los Santos

I think love is an imperative. It obligates you. — Marisa De Los Santos

Clare wasn't worried anymore about their being mean to each other. She imagined that someday she's be part of a friendship in which she and the friend thought so highly of each other and were so sure or this that they could say anything. — Marisa De Los Santos

Even if someone wasn't perfect or even especially good, you couldn't dismiss the love they felt. Love was always love; it had a rightness all its own, even if the person feeling the love was full of wrongness. — Marisa De Los Santos

I was there to get a Ph.D. in English literature. That's not true. I was there to read a lot of books and to discuss them with bright, insightful, book-loving people, an expectation that I pretty quickly learned was about as silly as it could be.
Certainly there were other people who loved books, I'm sure there were, but whoever had notified them ahead of time that loving books was not the point, was, in fact, a hopelessly counterproductive and naive approach to the study of literature, neglected to notify me. It turned out that the point was to dissect a book like a fetal pig in biology class or to break its back with a single sentence or to bust it open like a milkweek pod and say, "See? All along it was only fluff," and then scatter it into oblivion with one tiny breath. — Marisa De Los Santos