55 Quotes by M.L. Stedman

Stick to now. Put right the things you can put right today, and let the ones from back then go.

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.

If the war had taught her anything, it was to take nothing for granted: that it wasn’t safe to put off what mattered. Life could snatch away the things you treasured, and there was no getting them back.

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

Life could snatch away the things you treasured, and there was no getting them back. She began to feel an urgency, a need to seize an opportunity. Before anyone else did.

The oceans never stop. They know no beginning or end. The wind never finishes. Sometimes it disappears, but only to gather momentum from somewhere else, returning to fling itself at the island, to make a point which is lost on Tom.

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.

Who could blame her for wanting the baby to be alive? His Irene still cried sometimes about young Billy, and it had been twenty years since he’d drowned as a tot. They’d had five more kids since then, but it was never far away, the sadness.

I shouldn't have spoken like that.''People do, sometimes. People who've had less to contend with than you. We're not always in full control of our actions.