Old Blogs: Love Walked In

♥ Love Walked In ♥ by Marisa De Los Santos

This story isn't your fairytale romance, your picture perfect love. But it's love in every sense of the word: familial, friendship, romantic, and parental. This is a perfect depiction of what it means, from the eyes of a child and a woman, to search and hold on to love. The story addresses abandonment, loneliness, fear and ultimate joy. I closed this book feeling as though I just woke up and saw how important it is to hold on tight to the people I love, to tell them how much I loved them, and how I wanted immediately to start living with the grace and gratitude reflected by the two main characters, Clare and Cornelia. I think the message of this book is powerful due to Santos ability to pull at the heart-strings of anyone who's ever felt utterly alone, known love, or been terrified to know love because they know what it feels like to feel utterly alone. And it's the nature of the child, Clare, her strength, will and faith that bring readers of any age to yearn for the heart of a child when facing the struggles in life and love. If everyone could love, give, forgive and care the way that Clare and Cornelia do, the world would be a much more beautiful place.

Passages I Noted Throughout the Book:

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

♥ For another thing, he wasn't a list of attributes, but a flesh-and-blood man, as physically present a prescence as anyone I'd met in my life. When he told me he loved me, he said it in his particular voice with catches in his particular throat, and the bones and muscles of his face moved in familiar ways and also in ways I'd never seen. Can you understand what I'm saying? I'm not just talking again about the power of physical beauty. Less-than-fantastic sex notwithstanding, we were intimates; I'd breathed his breath, my skin knew his skin, my nerve endings had sparked under his touch. That kind of knowledge was deep and had never been something I could walk away from with ease. And he had taste and humor and effortless elegance.He was down right debonair, and how many men could you say that about? And, OK, he was. He was so beautiful.

♥ I don't think love is blind, but wanting to be in love, that's probably blind.

♥ True love is probably the most clear-eyed state of being there is.

♥ 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

♥ 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.

♥ She thought about the 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. Except of course that a writer didn't kill what she caught, didn't stuff it and hang it on a wall; the point was to keep stories alive. She felt skeptical about this way of thinking about writing, she decided, but was glad to have considered it.

♥ When disaster strikes, I want my mother. I want her, I want her, I want her.

♥ There are facts and then there is knowledge that has nothing to do with fact.

♥ Our family is as happy as Martin was debonair: unassailably, impenetrably, consummately. We are a pretty picture hung on the gleaming nail of my mother, who is the most consummate one of all, and carved into our pretty frame are the words: DON'T ROCK THE BOAT.

♥ 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.

♥ And somehow to Clare, this seemed no less magical than flowers that stayed alive for years, that one woman could so love another woman that she kept doing nice things for her even after she was gone. Like love was a habit you couldn't break. (About Mrs. Goldberg)

♥ Love was mixed up in all of it, like gold in a pan of sand. Sift. Sort. Pay attention.

♥ If you're the kind of person I used to be, you might think that real life means going after what you want and getting it. I thought that, as I skirted those edges (and don't get me wrong, I liked that skirting; there was joy in it - most of the time, that skirting was the lightest kind of dancing), gazing into other people's real lives like lit-up houses, places in which real people did the work of real life. I believed they'd all achieved their hearts' desires or were in the process of achieving them. There. That's what I mean: I believed the process of achieving them was life...

I'd figured out that a real life didnt' 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.

♥ Yes, it's true, what I said earlier: A real life doesn't mean getting what you want; the acievement, the privilege, too, is knowing what you love. But getting what you love? Having what you love love you back? Oh, my friend, it's a miracle: your one tiny life's head-on collision with divinity.

♥ Because that's what love does: You give up a house that's been your heart's home most of your life and come away feeling like you've been handed the sun and the moon.

♥Suddenly it seemed vitally important that everyone I loved know exactly how and how much. I felt feverish with them to know.

♥ My heart is large; it can contain everything at once, and the road I'm on with Teo, can you see it? It runs forward and backward and no matter which we travel on it, the direction is the same. You know the direction I mean: Homeward.