Top 50 Marisa de los Santos Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “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.”

— Marisa de los Santos

3. “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

4. “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

5. “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

6. “I am one of those people who believes that at least half of love is simply paying attention.”

— Marisa de los Santos

7. “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

8. “We think our parents are in charge, right? Like they know what they’re doing? But the truth is, they’re making it up as they go along, just like we are. Just like everyone. If we judge them by their worst mistakes, they’re all, like, gargantuan failures. Maybe you should try judging your mom by her intentions, by whether she, like, loves you and is doing her best.”

— Marisa de los Santos

9. “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...”

— Marisa de los Santos

10. “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

11. “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

12. “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

13. “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

14. “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

15. “I’ve always found allegories kind of comforting. When you encounter people named Liar and Abstinence, you might not be crazy about them, but you know exactly what you’re getting into.”

— Marisa de los Santos

16. “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

17. “I don’t think love is blind, but wanting to be in love, that’s probably blind.”

— Marisa de los Santos

18. “That was how her mother was, catching all the available light in any room and making it part of her.”

— Marisa de los Santos

19. “I know a lot of people do jobs their whole lives that they don’t find fascinating. Wonder is a luxury. But I wanted it.”

— Marisa de los Santos

20. “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.”

— Marisa de los Santos

21. “The examples seemed to fall into two categories: girls who used sweetness and girls who used pluck.”

— Marisa de los Santos

22. “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

23. “Everything turned on the word “we”, a synonym for love, the thing that saves us all.”

— Marisa de los Santos

24. “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

25. “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

26. “To understand that you have blown it, that you can never fix it is one of the worst feelings ever.”

— Marisa de los Santos

27. “I know how syrupy this sounds, how dull, provincial, and possibly whitewashed, but what can I do? Happy childhoods happen.”

— Marisa de los Santos

28. “It’s just that without wanting to or trying to – and for years I was deliberately trying not to – I held on to love. Or it held on to me. Not active love; not love, the verb form. It was more just there, a small, unshakable thing, leftover, useless, as vestigial as wisdom teeth or a tailbone, but still potent enough so that when I heard his voice on the phone, my heart gave a tiny jump of hope that made me want to slap it.”

— Marisa de los Santos

29. “In my experience, people love what they love. They just do.”

— Marisa de los Santos

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

— Marisa de los Santos

31. “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

32. “If you never share the worst thing you’ve ever done with a single person, if you just carry it all by yourself, maybe it comes between you and everyone you meet, even if it’s years later.”

— Marisa de los Santos

33. “He smiled the kind of smile that is the reason for wars and poetry.”

— Marisa de los Santos

34. “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

35. “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

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

— Marisa de los Santos

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

— Marisa de los Santos

38. “Soldiers in the heat of battle; death-row prisoners; explorers stranded in deserts, jungles, on mountaintops; anyone sick or lost or just tired and bewildered: we all wanted our mothers.”

— Marisa de los Santos

39. “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.”

— Marisa de los Santos

40. “But you’re wrong. Happiness is EARNED, like everything else. It’s achieved.”

— Marisa de los Santos

41. “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.”

— Marisa de los Santos

42. “Her head had been hurting for days, but under the falling water, the headache opened like a rose- bright red, layered, and complicated.”

— Marisa de los Santos

43. “It’s ok to feel happy, right? She hoped he’d know what she meant.”

— Marisa de los Santos

44. “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

45. “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.”

— Marisa de los Santos

46. “Cornelia – who was in town dropping off her children at her parents’ house for a week of, as she put it, “unfettered joy, limitless pie, and irreversible spoiling.”

— Marisa de los Santos

47. “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

48. “Oh, this here and now, this particular snapshot fragment of forever.”

— Marisa de los Santos

49. “A real life doesn’t mean getting what you want; the achievement, the privilege, too is knowing what you love.”

— Marisa de los Santos

50. “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