Falling Together Quotes

“Since you left there's been a you-shaped space beside me, all the time. It never goes away.”
― Marisa de los Santos, Falling Together

“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.”
― Marisa de los Santos, Falling Together

“I think love is an imperative. It obligates you.”
― Marisa de los Santos, Falling Together

“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.”
― Marisa de los Santos, Falling Together

“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.”
― Marisa de los Santos, Falling Together

“Honestly, William, time?' his mother had snapped. 'Distance? Those things have nothing whatsoever to do with love. Who knows that better than you?”
― Marisa de los Santos, Falling Together

“Soon, the two of them would leave this spot. . . walk into the house and into a whole changed world. . . ”
― Marisa de los Santos, Falling Together

“There is one Now: the spot where I stand, And one way the road goes: onward, onward.”
― David Teague, Saving Lucas Biggs

“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.”
― Marisa de los Santos, Falling Together

“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.”
― Marisa de los Santos, Falling Together

“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.)”
― Marisa de los Santos, Falling Together

“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.”
― Marisa de los Santos, Falling Together

“It was a good way to begin. I’ve found that almost everything is better when it starts with a joke and a mouthful of really great food.”
― Marisa de los Santos, Saving Lucas Biggs

“You mean you’re not on your way home?” asked Pen. Will could hear the joy in her voice. “Not unless you mean you,” he told her. “I’m on my way to you.”
― Marisa de los Santos, Falling Together

“The basic material of reality is all loosely connected and shifting, the tiny bits shimmering and scattering into holes that flash open and shut, blinking all around us.”
― Marisa de los Santos, Saving Lucas Biggs

“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.”
― Marisa de los Santos, Saving Lucas Biggs

“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.”
― Marisa de los Santos, Falling Together

“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.”
― Marisa de los Santos, Saving Lucas Biggs

“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.”
― Marisa de los Santos, Saving Lucas Biggs

“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.”
― Marisa de los Santos, Saving Lucas Biggs

“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.”
― Marisa de los Santos, Falling Together