reading...

“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.'" p.323” 
― M.L. Stedman, The Light Between Oceans

I've just finished this superb first novel from M.L. Stedman, and I truly loved it.  I went from wishing that things turned out the way that my heart felt they should, to just observing what humans so fiercely do - and the struggles with truth and fiction and the ever enduring love a mother has for her child -- in whichever form that child comes.

The above quote was just huge and profound.

And I want to remember it always.

The truth in it is so blaringly obvious - and so very applicable.