Quotes from Marisa de los Santos

Cornelia pulled love around me like a coat, tugged it shut, and did up the buttons, as if I belonged to her. And so I did.

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

For those few stolen minutes, she found she could let go, second by second, of everything that haunted her until her mind was empty as a scoured bowl and all she knew was flavor on her tongue, air against her face, the small, dazzling details of her scrap of world.

feel like there are all these unmade things inside my head, waiting for me to let them loose into the world. A whole galaxy of unmade things, so bright it hurts.

You're his blue sky. When everything else is darkness. But is he yours?

Not tailgating acknowledges the mystery and humanity of strangers. It's one of those small habits that speaks volumes.

It just seems like we --human beings -- know so much, but it's nothing compared to what we don't know.

since she and Marcus and her mother left, she's been close to obsessed with wanting

And then, one day, Edith gave me a house.

Leaning on a cane, with a book tucked under her free arm, she navigated carefully across the grass, her eyes on the ground, and then just as she got to where we sat, she raised her head - her white hairs starry as dandelion fluff in the morning sun - and smiled at me. "Courage, dear heart," she said in a ringing, surprisingly young voice, then dropped her eyes and walked on.

It was what Joseph had missed most during the war, all the small, scattered pieces of the precious and luminous ordinary, evidence that life insists on continuing.

She thought about that word "capture," how it put a writer on par with a fur trapper or big-game hunter, and how it implied that stories were whole and roaming around loose in the world, and a writer's job was to catch them.

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.

How arrogant to believe we are in control of what happens to the people we love, good or bad, when there's this giant, teeming universe of forces at work out there: biology, society, economics, physics, grief, greed, the Spanish Inquisition, meanness, illness, drugs, love, weather, accidents, randomness. Do you see what I mean?

But our little stories were glimpses into the interior; colorful postcards from the lands of Martin and Cornelia.

No one is truly interesting until he is in graduate school," pronounced Wilson.

I know the pull of a dark, complicated man, the kind who has trouble loving anyone but you. But let me tell you this: the ones who look like home are home.

I'd figured out that a real life didn't mean attaining my heart's desire, but knowing it, meant not the satisfaction, but the longing. Knowing what you love and why, I found out, is as real as it gets.

Never, ever lie, unless it's to spare someone's feelings or to weasel out of something you really don't want to do, but only if not doing that something will not result in bodily or even psychic harm to another human being, unless that human being is exceptionally mean in which case minor psychic harm is permissible"—my

The woman who picked us up when we fell down or wiped our faces or fed us lunch or yelled us down from treetops or out of mud (all of it so casually, with barely a break in the conversation or an extra breath) may have been our mother but could just as easily have been someone else's. We hardly noticed. The women merged into a kind of laughing, chatting, benevolent blur, a network of distracted love and safekeeping.

She feels like the subject of her sex life is a puppy or a ferret, something she'd never in her right mind let off its leash, but which is now somehow running amok among total strangers.

He pictured the black dot on the map again. Not very long ago, Dev had believed in the dot's randomness, but now the dot was houses, friends, trees, poems, fiery leaves snagged in his rake, his bike wheels on asphalt. He imagined the dot grown larger and printed with the words on his Milky Way poster: YOU ARE HERE.

I tried to tell him all the things I hadn't told him before. How it was both our faults, how I'd taken over with the kids and not let the two of us be in that together. 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.

Talking turned out to be Louise's talent. If talking were a sport, Louise would've been a marathoner.