Top 120 M.L. Stedman Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “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

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

— M.L. Stedman

53. “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

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

— M.L. Stedman

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

— M.L. Stedman

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

— M.L. Stedman

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

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

— M.L. Stedman

61. “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

62. “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

63. “Love’s bigger than rule books.”

— M.L. Stedman

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

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

— M.L. Stedman

68. “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

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. 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

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

— M.L. Stedman

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

— M.L. Stedman

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

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

— M.L. Stedman

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

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

— M.L. Stedman

87. “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

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

— M.L. Stedman

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

— M.L. Stedman

90. “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

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

— M.L. Stedman

92. “The only thing we can do is love that little girl as much as she deserves. And never, never hurt her!”

— M.L. Stedman

93. “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

94. “Lives gone, traces left.”

— M.L. Stedman

95. “If Tom is to take his leave of the world, he wants to remember the beauty of it, not just the suffering.”

— M.L. Stedman

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

— M.L. Stedman

97. “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

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

— M.L. Stedman

99. “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

100. “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