A Marriage at Sea 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

“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

“Doing limited the dangers of thinking.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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 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

“It is an irresistible thought, that we might be someone different somewhere else.”
― 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

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

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

“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

“when they can’t imagine sharing their life with someone else.”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

“For years he had been alone in the stubborn sort of way that lodges in people”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

“self-reliance and proved our emotional self-sufficiency.” As if it were an achievement, to need no one else.”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

“Maurice would tease Bob, which Bob hated, but it was only the natural order of things, the way families pass down pain like an inheritance.”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

“It’s thought that there are around three million shipwrecks at the bottom of the sea”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

“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

“Maurice ate first”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

“They watched it shrink back into the haze. Maurice gave up and sat back down in the dinghy. Maralyn kept waving her jacket.”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

“For what else is a marriage”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

“Two people have to choose and be chosen, and, most unlikely of all, these choices must happen at roughly the same time.”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

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

“Only the tenacity of my wife kept me alive,” he told the reporters. His impression of their roles had solidified into fact. He had given up; she had kept them going.”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

“Every sailor feels anxious before a voyage”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck

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

“overwhelming in its variety and demands. Too many people”
― Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck