Top 120 M.L. Stedman Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

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

— M.L. Stedman

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “He sat down to write, before realizing he had no idea what to say. He didn’t want to say anything; just send her a smile.”

— M.L. Stedman

60. “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

61. “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.”

— M.L. Stedman

62. “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

63. “You always imagine you’ll get the chance to say what needs to be said, to put things right. But that’s not always how it goes.”

— M.L. Stedman

64. “He is embraced by nature, which is waiting, ultimately, to receive him, to re-organize his atoms into another shape.”

— M.L. Stedman

65. “Es como si hubiera toda una galaxia esperando a que la descubras. Y yo quiero descubrir la tuya.”

— M.L. Stedman

66. “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

67. “Sometimes the contract to forget is as important as any promise to remember.”

— M.L. Stedman

68. “The town draws a veil over certain events. This is a small community where everyone knows that sometimes the contract to forget is as important as any promise to remember. Children can grow up having no knowledge of the indiscretion of their father in his youth or the illegitimate sibling who lives fifty miles away and bears another man’s name. History is that which is agreed upon by mutual consent. That’s how life goes on; protected by the silence that anaesthetises shame.”

— M.L. Stedman

69. “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

70. “He’d been on death’s books for so long, it seemed impossible that life was making an entry in his favor.”

— M.L. Stedman

71. “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

72. “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

73. “All night, far above him the light stood guard, slicing the darkness like a sword.”

— M.L. Stedman

74. “There had never been guarantee that conception would lead to a live birth, or that birth would lead to a life of any great length. Nature allowed only the fit and the lucky to share this paradise-in-the-making. Look inside the cover of any family Bible and you’d see the facts. The graveyards, too, told the story of the babies whose voices, because of a snakebite or a fever or a fall from a wagon, had finally succumbed to their mothers’ beseeching to “hush, hush, little one.”

— M.L. Stedman

75. “When it comes to the ocean, anything’s possible, I suppose. Anything at all.”

— M.L. Stedman

76. “Victorious and dead is a poor sort of victory.”

— M.L. Stedman

77. “Only gradually did he notice she was pretty, and more gradually still that she was probably beautiful.”

— M.L. Stedman

78. “The town draws a veil over certain events. This is a small community, where everyone knows that sometimes the contract to forget is as important as any promise to remember.”

— M.L. Stedman

79. “We each get a little turn at life, and if this ends up being how my turn went, it will still have been worth it.”

— M.L. Stedman

80. “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

81. “There was nothing he was going through that the stars had not seen before, somewhere, some time on this earth.”

— M.L. Stedman

82. “Beside him now on the veranda, Isabel was saying, “even though you hadn’t seen him for years, he was still your dad. You only ever get one of them. It’s bound to affect you, sweetheart.”

— M.L. Stedman

83. “With the composure that had first drawn Septimus to her mother Hanna stood straight and very still. “If that’s how you want it to be, dad, that’s how it will be!”

— M.L. Stedman

84. “Who could blame her for wanting the baby to be alive? His Irene still cried sometimes about young Billy, and it had been twenty years since he’d drowned as a tot. They’d had five more kids since then, but it was never far away, the sadness.”

— M.L. Stedman

85. “History is that which is agreed upon by mutual consent. That’s how life goes on – protected by the silence that anesthetizes shame.”

— M.L. Stedman

86. “Tom rarely thought of the house in terms of rooms either. It was just “home.” And something in him was saddened at the dissection of the island, the splitting off into the good and the bad, the safe and the dangerous. He preferred to think of it whole.”

— M.L. Stedman

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

90. “Of course, the losing of children had always been a thing that had to be gone through. There had never been guarantee that conception would lead to a live birth, or that birth would lead to a life of any great length. Nature allowed only the fit and the lucky to share this paradise-in-the-making.”

— M.L. Stedman

91. “There was nothing he was going through that the stars had not seen before, somewhere, some time on this earth. Given enough time, their memory would close over his life like healing a wound. All would be forgotten, all suffering erased.”

— M.L. Stedman

92. “As long as one has good things in the mind, one can be happy. This I know.”

— M.L. Stedman

93. “As Tom wandered back to Mrs Mewett’s, he thought about the little relics at the lighthouse – Docherty’s knitting, his wife’s jar of humbugs that sat untouched in the pantry. Lives gone, traces left. And he wondered about the despair of the man, destroyed by grief. It didn’t take a war to push you over that edge.”

— M.L. Stedman

94. “Isabel’s belly quickened at the sight of the baby – her arms knew instinctively how to hold the child and calm her, soothe her. As she scooped warm water over the infant, she registered the freshness of her skin, taunt and soft and without a wrinkle.”

— M.L. Stedman

95. “Put right the things you can put right today.”

— M.L. Stedman

96. “He must return to something solid, because if he didn’t, who knew where his mind or soul could blow away to, like a balloon without ballast.”

— M.L. Stedman

97. “Two opposing physical forces, they create an inexplicable reaction overpowered by a third, stronger force – the knowledge of having deprived his wife of a child.”

— M.L. Stedman

98. “Don’t get confused between a thing itself and the first time you come across it.”

— M.L. Stedman

99. “That night, Tom took a bottle of whisky, and went to watch the stars from near the cliff. The breeze played on his face as he traced the constellations, and tasted the burn of the liquid. He turned his attention to the rotation of the beam, and gave a bitter laugh at the thought that the dip of the light meant that the island itself was always left in darkness. A lighthouse is for others; powerless to illuminate the space closest to it.”

— M.L. Stedman

100. “No one was quite sure how to treat this mourning that wasn’t for a death.”

— M.L. Stedman