Marisa De Los Santos Quotes

Everything turned on the word "we", a synonym for love, the thing that saves us all.

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.)

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.

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.

Number six: Zach never tailgates, ever, no matter how slowly the car in front of him is going.
Because the driver in front of you could be anyone--an organ donor, a war hero, a man who's just lost his best friend, a kid with a new license doing her best, said Cornelia. Not tailgating acknowledges the mystery and humanity of strangers. It's one of those small habits that speaks volumes.

The Antioch Beach library was like something out of a good dream, if you're the kind of person who dreams about libraries, which I am ...

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Nowadays, I want to be smart, but back then, I'm afraid I wanted to seem smart, too.

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.

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.

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.

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.

She's the main character in her story, just like I'm the main character in mine.

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.

If you're going to rip someone off, it might as well be Audrey Hepburn.

To understand that you have blown it, that you can never fix it is one of the worst feelings ever.

Her head had been hurting for days, but under the falling water, the headache opened like a rose- bright red, layered, and complicated.

That was how her mother was, catching all the available light in any room and making it part of her.

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

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.

Maybe love comes in at the eyes, but not nearly as much as it comes in at the ears...

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.

Soon, the two of them would leave this spot ... walk into the house and into a whole changed world ...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ...

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The examples seemed to fall into two categories: girls who used sweetness and girls who used pluck.

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.

But I didn't cry. I sat stiller than I'd ever sat, just kind of falling in on myself, getting denser and smaller, and all the while I screamed. Not with my vocal chords, nothing so pure and ordinary as that. My mouth didn't move, but I screamed with my whole body, my hair, my fingers, the back of my neck, the pit of my stomach, the pores of my skin. I screamed until I didn't have any voice left, until I was empty, and then I floated, shivering, in an ice-cold ocean of silence.

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

I have lost things I will never stop missing.

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

I think there are certain people who change the way time moves.

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.

Maybe she would remember who he was, and maybe she would come back.

I don't think love is blind, but wanting to be in love, that's probably blind.

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.

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.

... I laughed simply because being this particular person in this particular world at this particular moment was cause for joy...

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?

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.

Like love was a habit you couldn't break.

I know a lot of people do jobs their whole lives that they don't find fascinating. Wonder is a luxury. But I wanted it.

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

She only hoped, and her hope was slender- a wisp of hope, a ghost.

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.

It was the first time! Just because there weren't fireworks the first time doesn't mean there will never be fireworks. We're human; we're adults; we teach each other; we communicate; fireworks don't just go off, wham-bang; fireworks evolve!'

Awestruck by the utter, asinine nonsense of this metaphor, everyone is still. Into the stillness, the ample woman drops the word 'Wrong.' Then she says it again. 'Wrong…I'm talking about science…Pheromones.' The woman turns to Cornelia. 'The chemicals in his body call out. The chemicals in your body answer. It either happens or it doesn't.'

On top of being dumb, Cornelia is dumbfounded.