M. L. Stedman Quotes

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

The isolation spins its mysterious cocoon, focusing the mind on one place, one time, one rhythm - the turning of the light. The island knows no other human voices, no other footprints. On the Offshore Lights you can live any story you want to tell yourself, and no one will say you're wrong: not the seagulls, not the prisms, not the wind.

There are times when the ocean is not the ocean - not blue, not even water, but some violent explosion of energy and danger: ferocity on a scale only gods can summon. It hurls itself at the island, sending spray right over the top of the lighthouse, biting pieces off the cliff. And the sound is a roaring of a beast whose anger knows no limits. Those are the nights the light is needed most.

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

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

We live with the decisions we makeThat’s what bravery is. Standing by the consequences of your mistakes.

To have any kind of a future you've got to give up hope of ever changing your past.

Oh, but my treasure, 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.

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

Right and wrong can be like bloody snakes: so tangled up that you can't tell which is which until you've shot 'em both, and then it's too late.

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

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.

Scars are just another kind of memory.

History is that which is agreed upon by mutual consent.

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

Every end is the beginning of something else.

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.

When it comes to their kids, parents are all just instinct and hope. And fear. Rules and laws fly straight out the window.

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

Sometimes life turns out hard, Isabel. Sometimes it just bites right through you. And sometimes, just when you think it's done its worst, it comes back and takes another chunk.

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

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.

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

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

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