Quotes from 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

I walked up the stairs to my apartment, carrying the moment carefully as though it were a glass globe full of butterflies. 

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.

In my experience, people love what they love. They just do. Or fail to love what they fail to love.

I have lost things I will never stop missing.

Conversationally, we were Fred and Ginger -- spin, slide, shuffle, bend.

Back when we were in love, even after we'd been together for years, that smile never stopped taking me by surprise. It was found money, an arrowhead, a shooting star, a great, shiny stroke of luck every single time.

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.

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.

Honestly, the idea of wanting to spend time with people one did not love absolutely mystified her.

A real life doesn't mean getting what you want; the achievement, the priviledge, too, is knowing what you love. But getting what you love? Having what you love love you back? Oh, my friend, its a miracle: your one tiny life's head-on collision with divinity.

Like love was a habit you couldn't break.

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.

All the books she'd read had taught her nothing about what you do when your mother doesn't die but turns into someone you don't know, someone who doesn't take care of you anymore.

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

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 ...