Quotes from Marisa de los Santos

Dev felt suddenly ashamed of himself for what he'd thought earlier, back in the car, that Lyssa should keep her craziness to herself, that having to feel compassion for a messed-up, hurting person was annoying and unfair.

too. Like I'm an outside person watching me do things. Except when I'm with you. Then, I'm on the inside.

I am not necessarily a balanced person by nature, but I try. When I think a bad thought, I try to balance it out with a happy one. It doesn't work all the time, but if I do say so myself, over the years, I've gotten good at it.

hydrofracking" (often just "fracking")." In a nutshell, hydrofracking (or "induced hydraulic fracturing") is the process of injecting highly pressurized, chemical-laced fluid into a rock layer far below the surface of the earth in order to make cracks in it, and then to use the cracks to get to fossil fuels that you couldn't get to before because they were so deeply buried.

as far as I can tell, no matter what the circumstances, parenthood is thrust upon a parent. 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.

What she came to was that 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.

Good intentions, talented players, everyone trying hard. Just bad casting.

Besides, some things just can't make the leap from past to present, and that hat was not a leaper.

When it happens— the great sea change, the alteration of one's life into something rich and strange— when it singles one out, one is always lucky, lucky automatically. I'm talking about transformation, and the transformation I'm talking about is always a gift. A blessing.

I cranked open my third-floor casement window, looked at Philadelphia- my piece of it- and let my affection for it lift lightly off me like a scent from a flower and drift out into the cool air.

What if grief isn't only missing people and being sad? That's how we usually think about it. But what if it's just -- reckoning with their being gone and with knowing they're never coming back?

When I pointed to the list, he read it quickly, then said, "I wish I'd known what was happening. I wish she'd told me," so ruefully that I wanted to touch him and did.

I'm not sure what I'll do next, though. The problem with me is that I like to work; I like to do what I do well and completely; I just don't have a calling. Not yet, anyway

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

I laughed. I cried. Sometimes, hours or days after I'd last seen Trillium, some tiny, jewel-colored piece of story would come winging toward me out of the blue, and I would laugh or cry again.

Such meanness served up in the sweetest tones, and to someone whose need for love was terrible in its completeness.

You must promise to give yourself entirely to someone or something because that's who you are. You are a genius at devoting yourself; it's what makes you happiest.

Crossing the ruins of the garden, Charlie tripped on a cucumber vine and crashed into Margaret, and as soon as he got himself steady again, she shoved him down in a patch of brand-new tomatoes, laughing, laughing, laughing, laughing. "Not to dispute the importance of your family quirk," I told John O'Malley, with a nod toward the two of them, "but sometimes you don't need to be a time traveler to see the future.

At first she was happy because she had decided to be, and then she relaxed into her happiness and just felt it.

It was an answer I should have savored; instead, it gave rise to that moment. You know what I mean. The moment in a relationship in which at the same time you discover you've been floating in air for five and a half weeks, you also discover that your feet have dropped a little closer to the earth.

I won't gush about his appearance, except to say that he was beautiful in the way certain handcrafted wooden objects are beautiful—so seamless, smooth, curved, lustrous, so fully realized and self-contained that it only strikes you seconds later and with the force of a lightning bolt: "Oh my God, that's a chair!" At which point, you sit down and want to stay forever.

She could imagine sustaining certain emotions at that pitch for that long—love absolutely, grief probably, guilt maybe—but hatred was exhausting and gave so little back.