"Jimmy Stewart is always and indisputably the best man in the world, unless Cary Grant should happen to show up."
— Marisa de los Santos (Love Walked In)

"It's a well-known fact. All women are clinically insane, but especially ballet dancers. Psycho. extremely psycho. Trust me."
— Marisa de los Santos (Belong to Me: A Novel)

"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 (Love Walked In)

"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 (Love Walked In)

"I don't think love is blind, but wanting to be in love, that's probably blind."
— Marisa de los Santos (Love Walked In)

"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 (Love Walked In)

"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 (Belong to Me: A Novel)

"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 (Love Walked In)

"It's a well-known fact. All women are clinically insane, but especially ballet dancers. Psycho. estremely psycho. Trust me."
— Marisa de los Santos (Belong to Me: A Novel)

"Everything turned on the word "we", a synonym for love, the thing that saves us all."
— Marisa de los Santos (Belong to Me: A Novel)

"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 (Love Walked In)

"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 (Love Walked In)

"A real life doesn't mean getting what you want; the achievement, the privilege, too is knowing what you love."
— Marisa de los Santos (Love Walked In)

"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 (Love Walked In)

"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 (Belong to Me: A Novel)

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

"If you're going to rip someone off, it might as well be Audrey Hepburn."
— Marisa de los Santos (Love Walked In)

"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 (Love Walked In)

"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 (Love Walked In)

"It's ok to feel happy, right? She hoped he'd know what she meant."
— Marisa de los Santos (Love Walked In)

"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 (Love Walked In)

"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 (Love Walked In)

"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 (Love Walked In)

"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 (Love Walked In)

"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 (Belong to Me: A Novel)

"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 (Belong to Me: A Novel)

"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 (Belong to Me: A Novel)

"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 (Belong to Me: A Novel)

"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 (Belong to Me: A Novel)

"In my experience, people love what they love. They just do."
— Marisa de los Santos (Love Walked In)

"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 (Love Walked In)

"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 (Love Walked In)

"Maybe she would remember who he was, and maybe she would come back."
— Marisa de los Santos (Belong to Me: A Novel)

"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 (Belong to Me: A Novel)

"But you're wrong. Happiness is EARNED, like everything else. It's achieved."
— Marisa de los Santos (Love Walked In)

"I know how syrupy this sounds, how dull, provincial, and possibly whitewashed, but what can I do? Happy childhoods happen"
— Marisa de los Santos (Belong to Me: A Novel)

"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

"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

""Don't ask for the moon -- we have the stars!" Pardon my 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 (Love Walked In)

"Everything turned on the word "we", a synonym for love, the thing that saves us all. "
— Marisa de los Santos (Belong to Me: A Novel)

"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

"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 (Belong to Me: A Novel)

"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 (Love Walked In)

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


"
— Marisa de los Santos (Love Walked In)

"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 (Love Walked In)

"The examples seemed to fall into two categories: girls who used sweetness and girls who used pluck."
— Marisa de los Santos (Love Walked In)

""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 (Belong to Me: A Novel)

"...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