Top 100 M.L. Stedman Quotes
#1. Your family's never in your past. You carry it around with you everywhere.
M.L. Stedman
#3. If a lighthouse looks like it's in a different place, it's not the lighthouse that's moved.
M.L. Stedman
#4. Only gradually did he notice she was pretty, and more gradually still that she was probably beautiful.
M.L. Stedman
#5. Here in a place where there's just wind an waves and light, and the intricate machinery that keeps the flame burning and the lantern turning. Always turning. Always looking over its shoulder
M.L. Stedman
#6. I'm all right on my own. And I'm all right with a bit of company. It's the switching from one to the other that gets me.
M.L. Stedman
#7. To bear witness to the death, without being broken by the weight of it.
M.L. Stedman
#8. This focusing outward ... painful as it was, saved her from a more intolerable examination.
M.L. Stedman
#9. Later still, the war memorials would sprout from the earth, dwelling not on the loss, but on what the loss had won, and what a fine thing it was to be victorious. "Victorious and dead," some muttered, "is a poor sort of victory.
M.L. Stedman
#10. If the war had taught her anything, it was to take nothing for granted: that it wasn't safe to put off what mattered. Life could snatch away the things you treasured, and there was no getting them back.
M.L. Stedman
#11. cubbies together. She was a bit older, and always had to be
M.L. Stedman
#12. Christ
the quickest way to send a bloke mad is to let him go on re-fighting his war till he gets it right.
M.L. Stedman
#14. if a parent loses a child, there was no special label for their grief. They were still just a mother or a father, even if they no longer had a son or daughter. That seemed odd.
M.L. Stedman
#15. It is a luxury to do something that serves no practical purpose: the luxury of civilization.
M.L. Stedman
#16. Our own star! Like the world's been made just for us! With the sunshine and the ocean. We have each other all to ourselves.
M.L. Stedman
#17. What your wife's going to say you did or didn't do, if
M.L. Stedman
#18. Every end is the beginning of something else.
M.L. Stedman
#19. Once a child gets into your heart, there's no right or wrong about it.
M.L. Stedman
#20. I shouldn't have spoken like that.'
'People do, sometimes. People who've had less to contend with than you. We're not always in full control of our actions.
M.L. Stedman
#21. I warn you, though, he's not the happiest corpse in the morgue. Not much of a talker, Neville Whittnish.
M.L. Stedman
#22. Oh, but my treasure, it is so much less exhausting. You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad things. - as Frank Roennfeldt
M.L. Stedman
#23. It occurs to him that there are different versions of himself to farewell - the abandoned eight-year-old; the delusional soldier who hovered somewhere in hell; the lightkeeper who dared to leave his heart undefended. Like Russian dolls, these lives sit within him.
M.L. Stedman
#24. He's lived the life he's lived. He's loved the woman he's loved. No one ever has or ever will travel quite the same path on this earth and that's all right by home.
M.L. Stedman
#27. No one ever has or ever will travel quite the same path on earth ...
M.L. Stedman
#28. Years bleach away the sense of things until all that's left is a bone-white past, stripped of feeling and significance.
M.L. Stedman
#29. So many men who had dodged death over there now seemed addicted to its lure.
M.L. Stedman
#30. A goblin thought jumps onto her shouder: what's the point of tomorrow?
M.L. Stedman
#31. A lighthouse is for others; powerless to illuminate the space closest to it.
M.L. Stedman
#32. Perhaps when it comes to it, no one is just the worst thing they ever did.
M.L. Stedman
#34. Then this is how you do it,' and kissed her slowly, letting time fade away. And he couldn't remember any other kiss that felt quite the same.
M.L. Stedman
#35. Izz, I've learned the hard way that to have any kind of a future you've got to give up hope of ever changing your past.
M.L. Stedman
#36. Then he remembered Ralph's words
no point in fighting your war over and over until you get it right.
M.L. Stedman
#37. Life,' thought Septimus, ... 'you could never trust the bastard. What it gives with one hand, it takes away with the other.
M.L. Stedman
#38. Life could snatch away the things you treasured, and there was no getting them back. She began to feel an urgency, a need to seize an opportunity. Before anyone else did.
M.L. Stedman
#39. Putting down the burden of the lie has meant giving up the freedom of the dream.
M.L. Stedman
#40. Nature allowed only the fit and the lucky to share this paradise-in-the-making.
M.L. Stedman
#41. Maatsuyker, the wild island south of Tasmania where it rained most days of the year and the chickens blew into the sea during storms.
M.L. Stedman
#42. Even Reverend Norkells urged her to spend less time in the stony darkness of the church and to "look for Christ in the life around her.
M.L. Stedman
#43. Your trench. The lice were "chats," the food was
M.L. Stedman
#44. You could kill a bloke with rules, Tom knew that. And yet sometimes they were what stood between man and savagery, between man and monsters.
M.L. Stedman
#45. You have only to forgive once. To resent, you have to doit all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad things" Frank to Hannah Roennfeldt
M.L. Stedman
#46. We live with the decisions we make, Bill. That's what bravery is. Standing by the consequences of your mistakes.
M.L. Stedman
#48. You've had so much strife but you're always happy. How do you do it?" "I choose to,
M.L. Stedman
#49. Sometimes, you're the one who strikes it lucky. Sometimes, it's the other poor bastard who's left with the short straw, and you just have to shut up and get on with it.
M.L. Stedman
#50. Her bond with the couple who raised her is fierce and beyond questioning. She cannot name the sensation of losing them as grief. She has no word for longing or despair.
M.L. Stedman
#51. improbable to Tom that such endless space could exist
M.L. Stedman
#52. Such a mysterious business, motherhood. How brave a woman must be to embark on it.
M.L. Stedman
#53. excoriated and burned, mapped and measured and meted
M.L. Stedman
#54. Then in 1914 things changed. Partageuse found that it too had something the world wanted. Men. Young men. Fit men. Men who had spent their lives swinging an ax or holding a plow and living it hard. Men who were the prime cut to be sacrificed on tactical altars a hemisphere away.
M.L. Stedman
#55. Other blokes might take advantage, but to Tom, the idea of honor was a kind of antidote to some of the things he'd lived through.
M.L. Stedman
#56. Always slightly off balance. It was a new sensation for him.
M.L. Stedman
#57. Or I can forgive and forget ... Oh, but my treasure, it is so much less exhausting. You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad things ... we always have a choice.
M.L. Stedman
#58. You don't think ahead in years or months: you think about this hour, and maybe the next. Anything else is speculation.
M.L. Stedman
#59. Sometimes it's good to leave the past in the past.
M.L. Stedman
#60. Being over there changes a man. Right and wrong don't look so different anymore to some.
M.L. Stedman
#61. He was a practical man: give him a sensitive technical instrument, and he could maintain it; something broken, and he could mend it, meditatively, efficiently. But confronted by his grieving wife, he felt useless.
M.L. Stedman
#62. Tom tingled at the knowledge that he was the only one to hear any of it: the only living man for the better part of a hundred miles in any direction. He thought of the gulls nestled into their wiry homes on the cliffs, the fish hovering stilly in the safety of the
M.L. Stedman
#63. Oh merciful God, grant that the old Adam in this child may be so buried, that the new man may be raised up in her....
M.L. Stedman
#65. You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day.
M.L. Stedman
#66. Soon enough the days will close over their lives, the grass will grow over their graves, until their story is just an unvisited headstone.
M.L. Stedman
#67. History is that which is agreed upon by mutual consent.
M.L. Stedman
#68. Perhaps the same labeling obsession caused cartographers to split this body of water into two oceans, even though it is impossible to touch an exact point at which their currents begin to differ. Splitting. Labeling. Seeking out otherness. Some things don't change.
M.L. Stedman
#69. That's how life goes on - protected by the silence that anesthetizes shame.
M.L. Stedman
#70. No one was quite sure how to treat this mourning that wasn't for a death.
M.L. Stedman
#71. What are you suggesting I do Ralph?'
'I'm suggesting you tell the bloody truth whatever it is. The only place lying leads is trouble.'
"Sometimes that's the only place telling the truth get you, too.
M.L. Stedman
#72. Needed mothering. Grief and distance bound the wound, perfecting the bond
M.L. Stedman
#73. All you need is patience and a bit of nous.
M.L. Stedman
#74. Victorious and dead is a poor sort of victory
M.L. Stedman
#75. When it comes to the ocean, anything's possible, I suppose. Anything at all.
M.L. Stedman
#76. We can't rightly ever talk about the future, if you think about it. We can only talk about what we imagine or wish for. It's not the same thing.
M.L. Stedman
#77. Losing of children had always been a thing that had to be gone through. There had never been any guarantee that conception would lead to a live birth, or that birth would lead to a life of any great length.
M.L. Stedman
#79. Perhaps none of this existed, for the inches between them seemed to divide two entirely different realities, and they no longer joined.
M.L. Stedman
#81. You've had a whole life, a whole story, and I've come in late. I'm only trying to make sense of things. Make sense of you.
M.L. Stedman
#82. He struggles to make sense of it
all this love, so bent out of shape, refracted, like light through the lens ...
M.L. Stedman
#83. He looked at the picture of his mother in the locket. Perhaps each of his parents loved him, however brokenly. He felt a sudden urge of anger at his father's almost casual assumption of the right to separate him from his mother: so sincere, yet so destructive.
M.L. Stedman
#84. I was born to meet you, Izz. I reckon that's what I was put here for,
M.L. Stedman
#85. The only thing we can do is love that little girl as much as she deserves. And never, never hurt her!
M.L. Stedman
#87. I've learned the hard way that to have any kind of a future you've got to give up hope of ever changing your past. She
M.L. Stedman
#88. Very slowly, he turned a full circle, taking in the nothingness of it all. It seemed his lungs could never be large enough to breathe in this much air, his eyes could never see this much space, nor could he near the full extent of the rolling, roaring ocean. For the briefest moment, he had no edges.
M.L. Stedman
#89. between words. "It's coming! The baby's coming.
M.L. Stedman
#90. The oceans never stop. They know no beginning or end. The wind never finishes. Sometimes it disappears, but only to gather momentum from somewhere else, returning to fling itself at the island, to make a point which is lost on Tom.
M.L. Stedman
#91. Stick to now. Put right the things you can put right today, and let the ones from back then go. Leave the rest to the angels, or the devil or whoever's in charge of it.
M.L. Stedman
#92. Sometimes the contract to forget is as important as any promise to remember
M.L. Stedman
#93. Put right the things you can put right today.
M.L. Stedman
#94. There was nothing he was going through that the stars had not seen before, somewhere, some time on this earth.
M.L. Stedman
#95. From when she was a baby, Tom has taught the girl to respect, but not fear, the forces of nature- the lightning that might strike the light tower on Janus, the oceans that batter the island.
M.L. Stedman
#96. Isabel sat up, and looked deep into his eyes. 'What goes on in there, I wonder?
M.L. Stedman
#97. You could still tell at a glance who'd been over there and who'd sat the war out at home. You could smell it on a man.
M.L. Stedman
#98. But a sliver of un-crossable distance had slipped between them; an invisible, wisp-thin no man's land.
M.L. Stedman
#99. He bit the narrow end of the flower and sucked the droplet of nectar from its base. 'You only taste it for a second. But it's worth it.' page 333
M.L. Stedman
#100. When he wakes sometimes from dark dreams of broken cradles, and compasses without bearings, he pushes the unease down, lets the daylight contradict it. And isolation lulls him with the music of the lie.
M.L. Stedman
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