Home > Author > M.L. Stedman
41 " Perhaps when it comes to it, no one is just the worst thing they ever did. "
― M.L. Stedman , The Light Between Oceans
42 " History is that which is agreed upon by mutual consent. "
43 " We live with the decisions we make, Bill. That’s what bravery is. Standing by the consequences of your mistakes. "
44 " You don’t think ahead in years or months: you think about this hour, and maybe the next. Anything else is speculation. "
45 " Sometimes it's good to leave the past in the past. "
46 " No one ever has or ever will travel quite the same path on earth... "
47 " 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 ... "
48 " Then he remembered Ralph's words--"no point in fighting your war over and over until you get it right. "
49 " When it comes to their kids, parents are all just instinct and hope. And fear. "
50 " Very slowly, he turned a full circle, taking in the nothingness of it all. It seemed his lungs could never be large enough to breathe in this much air, his eyes could never see this much space, nor could he near the full extent of the rolling, roaring ocean. For the briefest moment, he had no edges. "
51 " 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. "
52 " Humans withdraw to their homes, and surrender the night to the creatures that own it: the crickets, the owls, the snakes. A world that hasn't changed for hundreds of thousands of years wakes up, and carries on as if the daylight and the humans and the changes to the landscape have all been an illusion. "
53 " Putting down the burden of the lie has meant giving up the freedom of the dream. "
54 " Soon enough the days will close over their lives, the grass will grow over their graves, until their story is just an unvisited headstone. "
55 " I promised to spend my life with you. I still want to spend my life with you. Izz, I've learned the hard way that to have any kind of a future you've got to give up hope of ever changing your past. "
56 " If a lighthouse looks like it's in a different place, it's not the lighthouse that's moved. "
57 " 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. "
58 " I can forgive and forget... 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 "
59 " They [the stars] just kept shining, no matter what was going on. I think of the light here like that, like a splinter of a star that's fallen to earth: it just shines, no matter what is happening. "
― M.L. Stedman
60 " Once a child gets into your heart, there’s no right or wrong about it. "