M.L. Stedman Quotes

The law's the law, but people are people.

What your wife's going to say you did or didn't do, if

Love's bigger than rule books.

Never be sorry for smiling!

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.' page 333

A goblin thought jumps onto her shouder: what's the point of tomorrow?

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

Your trench. The lice were "chats," the food was

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

Years bleach away the sense of things until all that's left is a bone-white past, stripped of feeling and significance.

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

I warn you, though, he's not the happiest corpse in the morgue. Not much of a talker, Neville Whittnish.

Christ
the quickest way to send a bloke mad is to let him go on re-fighting his war till he gets it right.

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.

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

cubbies together. She was a bit older, and always had to be

Scars are just another kind of memory.

Talk about brass-monkey weather!

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

Once a child gets into your heart, there's no right or wrong about it.

Perhaps none of this existed, for the inches between them seemed to divide two entirely different realities, and they no longer joined.

We live with the decisions we make, Bill. That's what bravery is. Standing by the consequences of your mistakes.

Love's what children do.

Life,' thought Septimus, ... 'you could never trust the bastard. What it gives with one hand, it takes away with the other.

Sometimes the contract to forget is as important as any promise to remember

Putting down the burden of the lie has meant giving up the freedom of the dream.

That's how life goes on - protected by the silence that anesthetizes shame.

I was born to meet you, Izz. I reckon that's what I was put here for,

You've had a whole life, a whole story, and I've come in late. I'm only trying to make sense of things. Make sense of you.

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. She

Every end is the beginning of something else.

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

Victorious and dead is a poor sort of victory

Lives gone, traces left.

it, she decided to experiment.

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

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

No one was quite sure how to treat this mourning that wasn't for a death.

Then this is how you do it,' and kissed her slowly, letting time fade away. And he couldn't remember any other kiss that felt quite the same.

Our own star! Like the world's been made just for us! With the sunshine and the ocean. We have each other all to ourselves.

improbable to Tom that such endless space could exist

Even Reverend Norkells urged her to spend less time in the stony darkness of the church and to "look for Christ in the life around her.

between words. "It's coming! The baby's coming.

Isabel sat up, and looked deep into his eyes. 'What goes on in there, I wonder?

excoriated and burned, mapped and measured and meted

Being over there changes a man. Right and wrong don't look so different anymore to some.

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

When it comes to their kids, parents are all just instinct and hope. And fear. p.276

But a sliver of un-crossable distance had slipped between them; an invisible, wisp-thin no man's land.

Maatsuyker, the wild island south of Tasmania where it rained most days of the year and the chickens blew into the sea during storms.

All you need is patience and a bit of nous.

If a lighthouse looks like it's in a different place, it's not the lighthouse that's moved.

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.

Soon enough the days will close over their lives, the grass will grow over their graves, until their story is just an unvisited headstone.

Oh merciful God, grant that the old Adam in this child may be so buried, that the new man may be raised up in her....

History is that which is agreed upon by mutual consent.

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

Your family's never in your past. You carry it around with you everywhere.

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.

You've had so much strife but you're always happy. How do you do it?" "I choose to,

Always slightly off balance. It was a new sensation for him.

To bear witness to the death, without being broken by the weight of it.

Put right the things you can put right today.

Know that you have always been beloved.

We can't rightly ever talk about the future, if you think about it. We can only talk about what we imagine or wish for. It's not the same thing.

You don't think ahead in years or months: you think about this hour, and maybe the next. Anything else is speculation.

Nature allowed only the fit and the lucky to share this paradise-in-the-making.

When it comes to the ocean, anything's possible, I suppose. Anything at all.

Then he remembered Ralph's words
no point in fighting your war over and over until you get it right.

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.

Sometimes it's good to leave the past in the past.

the vicar. "Hath this child already

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

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.

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

Needed mothering. Grief and distance bound the wound, perfecting the bond

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