Top 120 M.L. Stedman Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— M.L. Stedman

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

— M.L. Stedman

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

— M.L. Stedman

8. “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

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

— M.L. Stedman

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

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

— M.L. Stedman

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

— 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. “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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “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

21. “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

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

— M.L. Stedman

23. “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

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

— M.L. Stedman

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

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

— M.L. Stedman

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

— M.L. Stedman

31. “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

32. “You never know what you’re going to be grateful for.”

— M.L. Stedman

33. “Love’s bigger than rule books.”

— M.L. Stedman

34. “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

35. “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

36. “To make sense of it – that’s the challenge. To bear witness to the death, without being broken by the weight of it.”

— M.L. Stedman

37. “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

38. “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

39. “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

40. “The northern side of the island is a sheer granite cliff which sets its jaw stiffly against the ocean below.”

— 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. “But if he doesn’t think about it too hard, he knows who he is and what he’s for. He just has to keep the light burning. Nothing more.”

— M.L. Stedman

43. “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

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. The rules that said you took a prisoner rather than killed a man. The rules that said you let the stretchers cart the enemy off from no man’s land as well as your own men.”

— M.L. Stedman

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

— M.L. Stedman

46. “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

47. “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

48. “There are times I wanted an answer. I can tell you that much. Times I saw a man’s last breath, and I wanted to ask him, ‘Where have you gone? You were here right beside me just a few seconds ago, and now some bits of metal have made holes in your skin, because they hit you fast enough, and suddenly you’re somewhere else. How can that be?”

— M.L. Stedman

49. “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

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

— M.L. Stedman