Sophie Elmhirst > Quotes

“But here was a way to evaluate existence. Measure its success by the extent to which you have loved and been loved.”
― Sophie Elmhirst, Maurice and Maralyn: An Extraordinary True Story of Love, Shipwreck and Survival

“There is nothing like seeing a place for the last time to erase its imperfections.”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

“Solitude, when chosen, can feel like such a gift.”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

“It was rare for him, this kind of clarity. But here was a way to evaluate existence. Measure its success by the extent to which you have loved and been loved. On that count, his life had been a triumph.”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

“And then what? After the wedding, after the honeymoon–well, then it’s just days. Ordinary days. The insurmountable, self-renewing chores. The bins, the laundry, the procession of meals. And those are the golden days, it turns out. The blissful, boring days that you long for when things go wrong.”
― Sophie Elmhirst, Maurice and Maralyn: An Extraordinary True Story of Love, Shipwreck and Survival

“It is possible to write yourself out of loneliness. Possible, too, to write yourself into being. As her body shrank, Maralyn built herself out of words, sentence by sentence. When she noted the happenings of the day, however bleak, the day was proven to be real and her faculties intact. The writing was the proof. The lists, the menus, and the clothes were reminders that such things still existed. Solid things, on solid ground, that she could make with her own hands. She was still alive. Look, it said so on the page.”
― Sophie Elmhirst, Maurice and Maralyn: An Extraordinary True Story of Love, Shipwreck and Survival

“Doing limited the dangers of thinking.”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

“I believe in all human beings there is a desire to love and be loved, to experience the full fierceness of human emotion, and to make it a measure of the success of one’s life. For me to write about Maralyn’s life is the most reliable way I can keep faith with this receding notion.”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

“What was there to say? Trapped inside a person, grief can feel like a rising tide of water, something vast and dramatic requiring release. But once spoken, it tends to reveal itself to be the same, small essential things, over and over. He missed her. He struggled without her. He wished she were still there.”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

“were raised. After all, what is more self-interested than running away?”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

“pamphlet for fixing the raft. It was laughable. They were supposed to dry”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

“Departure is always clarifying, but particularly so on a boat. One moment, you are bound to the land by a rope; the next you are not.”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

“Misfortune can seem abstract in the midst of celebration. At the beginning, we imagine the bad weather might pass us by. It’s only natural, part of the long business of self-preservation, because how impossible it would be to go through life in full awareness of all that will befall us. Somewhere, deep within, unspoken, we must know, we do know, that we’ll all have our time adrift. For what else is a marriage, really, if not being stuck on a small raft with someone and trying to survive?”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

“Signs tend to reveal themselves only in retrospect.”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

“They were abandoning everyone they knew to live afloat, alone, unshackled from obligation and community, from all the things that bind a person to a place or its people, from the day-to-day indignities of ordinary life and the unseen rules whose weight perhaps you feel only in the place you”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

“Their situation was a result of his failure, certainly not the master plan of some higher force.”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

“Five We talk about the dead to keep them alive. The conversation tends to work better with people who knew them too. To anyone else the dead are fictitious. A name, a picture, an anecdote about something they once did or said, but nothing close to flesh and warmth and movement. It’s hard, in the middle of grief, to clearly describe the person you miss. Sometimes you can’t even see them, or remember what they sounded like. If you look too hard at a memory, it dissolves.”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

“It is not so much the feats of endurance that keep people alive as the absence of surrender.”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

“it’s just days. Ordinary days. The insurmountable, self-renewing chores. The bins, the laundry, the procession of meals. And those are the golden days, it turns out. The blissful, boring days that you long for when things go wrong.”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

“If in doubt, do. Things always need to be done. All vessels, all homes, however small and insubstantial, require a system.”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

“It’s hard, in the middle of grief, to clearly describe the person you miss. Sometimes you can’t even see them, or remember what they sounded like. If you look too hard at a memory, it dissolves.”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

“In an overpopulated town on the south coast of England, Maurice was lonelier than he had ever been on a life raft in the middle of an ocean with his wife.”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

“After so long untold, the encounter is real, vivid, as if happening in the moment of telling, an earlier self and a present self somehow folding together so that all experience is current and the dead are alive.”
― Sophie Elmhirst

“I believe in all human beings there is a desire to love and be loved, to experience the full fierceness of human emotion, and to make it a measure of the success of one’s life.”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

“here was a way to evaluate existence. Measure its success by the extent to which you have loved and been loved.”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

“His need had been her occupation.”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

“Misfortune can seem abstract in the midst of celebration. At the beginning, we imagine the bad weather might pass us by. It’s only natural, part of the long business of self-preservation, because how impossible it would be to go through life in full awareness of all that will befall us.”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

“And those are the golden days, it turns out. The blissful, boring days that you long for when things go wrong.”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

“Every story is a series of choices: what to include, what to leave out. Each selection or omission distorts the material.”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

“bungalow. Doing”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck