Maurice and Maralyn: An Extraordinary True Story of Love, Shipwreck and Survival

by Sophie Elmhirst

Love, when it works, can feel like such a terrifying fluke. Two people have to choose and be chosen, and, most unlikely of all, these choices must happen at roughly the same time.

People get tired or overconfident. Their judgement skews. You have to adapt. You need to know what to do and how to do it in an instant; to act with a kind of light, unthinking instinct, the way a dancer might shift position mid-flight.

Departure is always clarifying,

You are attached to a nation and its people, then you loosen the tie. Emigration contains two forces: the pull of what you are going towards, or what you imagine you are going towards, and the release from what you are leaving behind, or what you imagine you are leaving behind.

There is nothing like seeing a place for the last time to erase its imperfections.

For good or ill, sometimes we can only see ourselves through the eyes of a partner, as though they have greater access to reality, or at least a version undistorted by our own thoughts.

It is not so much the feats of endurance that keep people alive as the absence of surrender.

It is possible to write yourself out of loneliness. Possible, too, to write yourself into being. As

Solitude, when chosen, can feel like such a gift.

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.