Top 120 M.L. Stedman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day.”

— M.L. Stedman

Featured in: Forgiveness Quotes

2. “Every end is the beginning of something else.”

— M.L. Stedman

3. “We live with the decisions we makeThat’s what bravery is. Standing by the consequences of your mistakes.”

— M.L. Stedman

4. “Sometimes it’s good to leave the past in the past.”

— M.L. Stedman

5. “Scars are just another kind of memory.”

— M.L. Stedman

6. “Such a mysterious business, motherhood. How brave a woman must be to embark on it.”

— M.L. Stedman

7. “No one ever has or ever will travel quite the same path on earth...”

— M.L. Stedman

8. “History is that which is agreed upon by mutual consent.”

— M.L. Stedman

9. “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

10. “The law’s the law, but people are people.”

— M.L. Stedman

11. “That’s how life goes on – protected by the silence that anesthetizes shame.”

— M.L. Stedman

12. “When it comes to their kids, parents are all just instinct and hope. And fear. Rules and laws fly straight out the window.”

— M.L. Stedman

13. “Once a child gets into your heart, there’s no right or wrong about it.”

— M.L. Stedman

14. “It is a luxury to do something that serves no practical purpose: the luxury of civilization.”

— M.L. Stedman

15. “To have any kind of a future you’ve got to give up hope of ever changing your past.”

— M.L. Stedman

16. “Nature allowed only the fit and the lucky to share this paradise-in-the-making.”

— M.L. Stedman

17. “So many men who had dodged death over there now seemed addicted to its lure.”

— M.L. Stedman

18. “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

19. “There are times when the ocean is not the ocean – not blue, not even water, but some violent explosion of energy and danger: fierceness on a scale only gods can summon.”

— M.L. Stedman

20. “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

21. “Right and wrong can be like bloody snakes: so tangled up that you can’t tell which is which until you’ve shot ’em both, and then it’s too late.”

— M.L. Stedman

22. “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

23. “Perhaps when it comes to it, no one is just the worst thing they ever did.”

— M.L. Stedman

24. “Anyone who’s worked on the Offshore Lights can tell you about it – the isolation, and the spell it casts. Like.”

— M.L. Stedman

25. “He smiled that Frank smile. “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.” He laughed, pretending to wipe sweat from his brow. “I would have to make a list, a very, very long list and make sure I hated the people on it the right amount. That I did a very proper job of hating, too: very Teutonic! No” – his voice became sober – “we always have a choice. All of us.”

— M.L. Stedman

26. “The smell of the eucalyptus had wafted for miles offshore from Albany, and when the scent faded away he was suddenly sick at the loss of something he didn’t know he could miss.”

— M.L. Stedman

27. “Words had a way of getting into all sorts of places they weren’t meant to.”

— M.L. Stedman

28. “It is so much less exhausting. You only forgive once. To resent you have to do it all day, every day. You have to keep remembering the bad things.”

— M.L. Stedman

29. “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

30. “The wind had kept up its sullen howl. The late-afternoon sun continued to shine in through the window, laying a blanket of bright gold over the woman and her almost-baby. The old clock on the kitchen wall still clicked its minutes with fussy punctuality. A life had come and gone and nature had not paused a second for it. The machine of time and space grinds on, and people are fed through it like grist through the mill.”

— M.L. Stedman

31. “Doorways. Always looking both ways, torn between two ways of seeing things. January looks forward to the new year and back to the old year. He sees past and future. And the island looks in the direction of two different oceans, down to the South Pole and up to the Equator.”

— M.L. Stedman

32. “The line between the ocean and the sky became harder to judge, as the light faltered second by second. The barometer was falling. There would be a storm before morning. Tom checked.”

— M.L. Stedman

33. “Why won’t you talk about it?” “I’ll tell you if you really want. It’s just I’d rather not. Sometimes it’s good to leave the past in the past.” “Your family’s never in your past. You carry it around with you everywhere.”

— M.L. Stedman

34. “The oceans never stop... the wind never finishes. Sometimes it disappears, but only to gather momentum from somewhere else, returning to fling itself at the island... Existence here is on the scale of giants. Time is in the millions of years; rocks which from a distance look like dice cast against the shore are boulders hundreds of feet wide, licked round by millennia...”

— M.L. Stedman

35. “Pride of Birmingham foundered on the greedy rocks in daylight. In such a ship the light itself had later been brought from England, proudly bearing the name Chance Brothers, a guarantee of the most advanced technology of its day – capable of assembly anywhere, no matter how inhospitable or hard to reach.”

— M.L. Stedman

36. “The forest sings to him: the rain tapping n the leaves, dripping into puddles, the kookaburras laughing like madmen at some joke beyond human comprehension. He has the sensation of being part of a connected whole, of being enough. Another day or another decade will not change this. He is embraced by nature, which is waiting, ultimately, to receive him, to re-organize his atoms into another shape.”

— M.L. Stedman

37. “He struggles to make sense of it – all this love, so bent out of shape, refracted, like light through the lens.”

— M.L. Stedman

38. “Lives gone, traces left. And he wondered about the despair of the man, destroyed by grief.”

— M.L. Stedman

39. “A lighthouse is for others; powerless to illuminate the space closest to it.”

— M.L. Stedman

40. “It’s like I was color-blind before Lucy, and now the world’s completely different. It’s brighter and I can see further. I’m in exactly the same place, the birds are the same, the water’s the same, the sun rises and sets just like it always did, but I never knew what for, Tom.”

— M.L. Stedman

41. “Life,’ thought Septimus,... ’you could never trust the bastard. What it gives with one hand, it takes away with the other.”

— M.L. Stedman

42. “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

43. “Perhaps none of this existed, for the inches between them seemed to divide into two entirely different realities, and they no longer joined.”

— M.L. Stedman

44. “Love’s bigger than rule books.”

— M.L. Stedman

45. “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

46. “A goblin thought jumps onto her shouder: what’s the point of tomorrow?”

— M.L. Stedman

47. “Just like the mercury that made the light go around, Isabel was -mysterious. Able to cure and to poison; able to bear the whole weight of the light, but capable of fracturing into a thousand uncatchable particles, running off in all directions, escaping from itself.”

— M.L. Stedman

48. “As a fourteen-year-old, Isabel had searched the dictionary. She knew that if a wife lost a husband, there was a whole new word to describe who she was: she was now a widow. A husband became a widower. But if a parent lost 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 a daughter. That seemed odd. As.”

— M.L. Stedman

49. “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

50. “Everything’s ruined. Nothing can ever be put right.” Tom rested a hand on hers. “We’ve put things right as well as we can. That’s all we can do. We have to live with things the way they are now.”

— M.L. Stedman