Top 120 M.L. Stedman Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “Your family’s never in your past. You carry it around with you everywhere.”

— M.L. Stedman

53. “He watches the ocean surrender to night, knowing that the light will reappear.”

— M.L. Stedman

54. “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

55. “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

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

— M.L. Stedman

57. “Well, you just had to count your blessings and be thankful things weren’t worse.”

— M.L. Stedman

58. “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

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

— M.L. Stedman

60. “It’s a hard job, and a busy one. The lightkeepers have no union, not like the men on the store boats – no one strikes for better pay or conditions. The days can leave him exhausted or sore, worried by the look of a storm front coming in at a gallop, or frustrated by the way hailstones crush the vegetable patch. 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

61. “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

62. “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

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. “But it’s not always plain sailing, even when you’ve found the right girl. You’ve got to be in it for the long haul. You never know what’s going to happen: you sign up for whatever comes along. There’s no backing out.”

— M.L. Stedman

67. “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

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

— M.L. Stedman

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

— M.L. Stedman

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

— M.L. Stedman

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

81. “We always have a choice. All of us.”

— M.L. Stedman

82. “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

83. “This focusing outward... painful as it was, saved her from a more intolerable examination.”

— M.L. Stedman

84. “He had a sense of being waltzed backwards.”

— 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

86. “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

87. “He carries that other shadow, which is cast inward.”

— M.L. Stedman

88. “There was something mysterious about him – as though, behind his smile, he was still far away. She wanted to get to the heart of him.”

— M.L. Stedman

89. “But I want to!” An idea came to Isabel.”

— M.L. Stedman

90. “Never be sorry for smiling!”

— M.L. Stedman

91. “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

92. “Oh well, God comes good in the end, doesn’t he?”

— M.L. Stedman

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

— M.L. Stedman

94. “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

95. “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

96. “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

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

— M.L. Stedman

98. “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

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

— M.L. Stedman

100. “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