Quotes from The Light Between Oceans

“You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day.”
― M.L. Stedman, quote from The Light Between Oceans

“Scars are just another kind of memory.”
― M.L. Stedman, quote from The Light Between Oceans

“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.”
― M.L. Stedman, quote from The Light Between Oceans

“There are still more days to travel in this life. And he knows that the man who makes the journey has been shaped by every day and every person along the way. Scars are just another kind of memory....Soon enough the days will close over their lives, the grass will grow over their graves, until their story is just an unvisited headstone.”
― M.L. Stedman, quote from The Light Between Oceans

“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.”
― M.L. Stedman, quote from The Light Between Oceans

“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.”
― M.L. Stedman, quote from The Light Between Oceans

“But how? How can you just get over these things, darling?...You've had so much strife but you're always happy. How do you do it?'
'I choose to...I can leave myself to rot in the past, spend my time hating people for what happened, like my father did, or I can forgive and forget.'
'But it's not that easy.'
He smiled that Frank smile. '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...I would have to make a list, a very, very long list and make sure I hated the people on it the right amount. That I did a proper job of hating, too: very Teutonic! No' - his voice became sober- 'we always have a choice. All of us.”
― M.L. Stedman, quote from The Light Between Oceans

“Perhaps when it comes to it, no one is just the worst thing they ever did.”
― M.L. Stedman, quote from The Light Between Oceans

“History is that which is agreed upon by mutual consent.”
― M.L. Stedman, quote from The Light Between Oceans

“We live with the decisions we make, Bill. That’s what bravery is. Standing by the consequences of your mistakes.”
― M.L. Stedman, quote from The Light Between Oceans

“You don’t think ahead in years or months: you think about this hour, and maybe the next. Anything else is speculation.”
― M.L. Stedman, quote from The Light Between Oceans

“Sometimes it's good to leave the past in the past.”
― M.L. Stedman, quote from The Light Between Oceans

“No one ever has or ever will travel quite the same path on earth...”
― M.L. Stedman, quote from The Light Between Oceans

“It is a luxury to do something that serves no practical purpose: the luxury of civilization.”
― M.L. Stedman, quote from The Light Between Oceans

“Then he remembered Ralph's words--"no point in fighting your war over and over until you get it right.”
― M.L. Stedman, quote from The Light Between Oceans

“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 ...”
― M.L. Stedman, quote from The Light Between Oceans

“That's how life goes on - protected by the silence that anesthetizes shame.”
― M.L. Stedman, quote from The Light Between Oceans

“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.”
― M.L. Stedman, quote from The Light Between Oceans

“When it comes to their kids, parents are all just instinct and hope. And fear.”
― M.L. Stedman, quote from The Light Between Oceans

“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.”
― M.L. Stedman, quote from The Light Between Oceans

“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.”
― M.L. Stedman, quote from The Light Between Oceans

“Putting down the burden of the lie has meant giving up the freedom of the dream.”
― M.L. Stedman, quote from The Light Between Oceans

“Being over there changes a man. Right and wrong don't look so different anymore to some.”
― M.L. Stedman, quote from The Light Between Oceans

“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.”
― M.L. Stedman, quote from The Light Between Oceans

“Coming back last time to the house she grew up in, Isabel had been reminded of the darkness that had descended with her brothers' deaths, how loss had leaked all over her mother's life like a stain. As a fourteen-year-old, Isabel had searched the dictionary. She knew that if a wife lost a husband, there was a whole new word to describe who she was: she was now a widow. A husband became a widower. But if a parent loss a child, there was no special label for their grief. They were still just a mother or a father, even if they no longer had a son or daughter. That seemed odd. As to her own status, she wondered whether she was still technically a sister, now that her adored brothers had died.”
― M.L. Stedman, quote from The Light Between Oceans

“Sometimes, you're the one who strikes it lucky. Sometimes, it's the other poor bastard who's left with the short straw, and you just have to shut up and get on with it.”
― M.L. Stedman, quote from The Light Between Oceans

“Soon enough the days will close over their lives, the grass will grow over their graves, until their story is just an unvisited headstone.”
― M.L. Stedman, quote from The Light Between Oceans

“If a lighthouse looks like it's in a different place, it's not the lighthouse that's moved.”
― M.L. Stedman, quote from The Light Between Oceans

“Such a mysterious business, motherhood. How brave a woman must be to embark on it.”
― M.L. Stedman, quote from The Light Between Oceans

“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.”
― M.L. Stedman, quote from The Light Between Oceans

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“I’d always kept an eye on the house. I don’t mean doing repairs, for as the house didn’t belong to me that was not my place, but rather I’d keep watch over its decline. The changes come slowly, like watching a woman age: another line, the spread of crow’s feet, age spots rising slowly to the surface. One day the face you know is ravaged.”
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“Well it seems to me that there are books that tell stories, and then there are books that tell truths...," I began.
"Go on," she said
"The first kind, they show you life like you want it to be. With villains getting what they deserve and the hero seeing what a fool he's been and marrying the heroine and happy ending and all that. Like Sense and Sensibility or Persuasion. But the second kind, they show you life more like it is. Like in Huckleberry Finn where Huck's pa is a no-good drunk and Jim suffers so. The first kind makes you cheerful and contented, but the second kind shakes you up."
"People like happy ending, Mattie. They don't want to be shaken up."
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"...you're not," Lou said, licking deviled ham off her fingers.
"...no, I'm not. People in books are good and noble and unselfish, and people aren't that way... and I feel, well... hornswoggled sometimes. By Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and Louisa May Alcott. Why do writers make things sugary when life isn't that way?" I asked too loudly. "Why don't they tell the truth? Why don't they tell how a pigpen looks after the sow's eaten her children? Or how it is for a girl when her baby won't come out? Or that cancer has a smell to it? All those books, Miss Wilcox," I said, pointing at a pile of them," and I bet not one of them will tell you what cancer smells like. I can, though. It stinks. Like meat gone bad and dirty clothes and bog water all mixed together. Why doesn't anyone tell you that?"
No one spoke for a few seconds. I could hear the clock ticking and the sound of my own breathing. Then Lou quietly said, "Cripes, Mattie. You oughtn't to talk like that."
I realized then that Miss Wilcox had stopped smiling. Her eyes were fixed om me, and I was certain she'd decided I was morbid and dispiriting like Miss Parrish had said and that I should leave then and there.
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Miss Wilcox's eyes were still fixed on me, only now they were shiny. Like they were the day I got my letter from Barnard. "Make them care, Mattie," she said softly. "And don't you ever be sorry.”
― Jennifer Donnelly, quote from A Gathering Light

“No one, no one at all, ever set out to torture us on purpose! ... After all, was it because Pontius Pilate wanted to humiliate him that Christ was crucified between two thieves? It just happened to be crucifixion day that day - and there was only one Golgotha, and time was short.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, quote from The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Volume 1

“Here." Sam came over, stripped down to his boxers. "Hunch forward and put your head down."

Robin looked at him. "My safe word is monkey.”
― Suzanne Brockmann, quote from All Through the Night

“Destruction, hence, like creation, is one of Nature's mandates.”
― Marquis de Sade, quote from Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings

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