Top 100 M.l. Stedman Quotes
#1. Sometimes it's good to leave the past in the past.
M.L. Stedman
#2. They [the stars] just kept shining, no matter what was going on. I think of the light here like that, like a splinter of a star that's fallen to earth: it just shines, no matter what is happening.
M.L. Stedman
#3. That's how life goes on - protected by the silence that anesthetizes shame.
M.L. Stedman
#4. 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
#5. History is that which is agreed upon by mutual consent.
M.L. Stedman
#6. 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
#7. You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day.
M.L. Stedman
#9. 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
#10. 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
#12. 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
#13. Being over there changes a man. Right and wrong don't look so different anymore to some.
M.L. Stedman
#14. No one was quite sure how to treat this mourning that wasn't for a death.
M.L. Stedman
#15. Sometimes life turns out hard, Isabel. Sometimes it just bites right through you. And sometimes, just when you think it's done its worst, it comes back and takes another chunk.
M.L. Stedman
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. Always slightly off balance. It was a new sensation for him.
M.L. Stedman
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. excoriated and burned, mapped and measured and meted
M.L. Stedman
#22. Such a mysterious business, motherhood. How brave a woman must be to embark on it.
M.L. Stedman
#23. improbable to Tom that such endless space could exist
M.L. Stedman
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. I can forgive and forget ... 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.
M. L. Stedman - The Light Between Oceans
#27. 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
#28. Sometimes the contract to forget is as important as any promise to remember
M.L. Stedman
#29. 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
#30. between words. "It's coming! The baby's coming.
M.L. Stedman
#31. 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
#32. 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
#34. The only thing we can do is love that little girl as much as she deserves. And never, never hurt her!
M.L. Stedman
#35. I was born to meet you, Izz. I reckon that's what I was put here for,
M.L. Stedman
#36. 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
#37. But he wishes the people really knew who they were mourning: the Isabel he had met on the jetty, so full of life and daring and mischief. His Izzy. His other half of the sky.
M.L. Stedman
#38. He struggles to make sense of it
all this love, so bent out of shape, refracted, like light through the lens ...
M.L. Stedman
#39. You've had so much strife but you're always happy. How do you do it?" "I choose to,
M.L. Stedman
#40. 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
#42. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. When it comes to the ocean, anything's possible, I suppose. Anything at all.
M.L. Stedman
#47. Victorious and dead is a poor sort of victory
M.L. Stedman
#48. All you need is patience and a bit of nous.
M.L. Stedman
#49. Needed mothering. Grief and distance bound the wound, perfecting the bond
M.L. Stedman
#50. 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
#51. cubbies together. She was a bit older, and always had to be
M.L. Stedman
#52. 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
#53. I warn you, though, he's not the happiest corpse in the morgue. Not much of a talker, Neville Whittnish.
M.L. Stedman
#55. 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
#56. Once a child gets into your heart, there's no right or wrong about it.
M.L. Stedman
#57. Every end is the beginning of something else.
M.L. Stedman
#58. What your wife's going to say you did or didn't do, if
M.L. Stedman
#59. 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
#60. It is a luxury to do something that serves no practical purpose: the luxury of civilization.
M.L. Stedman
#61. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. This focusing outward ... painful as it was, saved her from a more intolerable examination.
M.L. Stedman
#68. To bear witness to the death, without being broken by the weight of it.
M.L. Stedman
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. As long as one has good things in the mind, one can be happy. This I know.
M.L. Stedman
#72. Only gradually did he notice she was pretty, and more gradually still that she was probably beautiful.
M.L. Stedman
#73. If a lighthouse looks like it's in a different place, it's not the lighthouse that's moved.
M.L. Stedman
#75. Your family's never in your past. You carry it around with you everywhere.
M.L. Stedman
#76. 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
#78. We live with the decisions we make, Bill. That's what bravery is. Standing by the consequences of your mistakes.
M.L. Stedman
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. Your trench. The lice were "chats," the food was
M.L. Stedman
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. Nature allowed only the fit and the lucky to share this paradise-in-the-making.
M.L. Stedman
#85. Putting down the burden of the lie has meant giving up the freedom of the dream.
M.L. Stedman
#86. 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
#87. Life,' thought Septimus, ... 'you could never trust the bastard. What it gives with one hand, it takes away with the other.
M.L. Stedman
#88. Then he remembered Ralph's words
no point in fighting your war over and over until you get it right.
M.L. Stedman
#89. When it comes to their kids, parents are all just instinct and hope. And fear. p.276
M.L. Stedman
#90. 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
#92. Perhaps when it comes to it, no one is just the worst thing they ever did.
M.L. Stedman
#93. A lighthouse is for others; powerless to illuminate the space closest to it.
M.L. Stedman
#94. A goblin thought jumps onto her shouder: what's the point of tomorrow?
M.L. Stedman
#95. So many men who had dodged death over there now seemed addicted to its lure.
M.L. Stedman
#96. 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
#97. No one ever has or ever will travel quite the same path on earth ...
M.L. Stedman
#100. 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
