Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
CHRIS CLEAVESometimes we don’t notice that someone is being brave, because they are only doing something that seems quite easy for us.
More Chris Cleave Quotes
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Death, of course, is a refuge. It’s where you go when a new name, or a mask and cape, can no longer hide you from yourself. It’s where you run to when none of the principalities of your conscience will grant you asylum.
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I write in the novel’s afterword that our recent wars “finish not with victory or defeat but with a calendar draw-down date and a presumption that we shall never be reconciled with the enemy”.
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Horror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it.
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Yet war doesn’t end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
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Psychiatry in this place is like serving an in-flight meal in the middle of a plane crash. If I wanted to make you well, as a doctor, I should be giving you a parachute, not a cheese-and-pickle sandwich.
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I’m always determined that as a novelist I’m going to go out there and research my characters very thoroughly before I start writing.
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Things that we have to really dare ourselves to do come quite naturally to others.
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I planned how I would kill myself in the time of Churchill (stand under bombs), Victoria (throw myself under a horse), and Henry the Eighth (marry Henry the Eighth)- Little Bee
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Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive. The next thing you know something fine will happen to her, something marvelous, and then she will turn around and smile.
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I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn’t the most athletic guy at school.
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Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive
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This is the forked tongue of grief again. It whispers in one ear: return to what you once loved best, and in the other ear it whispers, move on.
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A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.
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To be well in your mind you have first to be free.
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There’s what people say, and there’s what people mean, and I like to explore the difference between the two.
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I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.
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My paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the regional Blitz, in Birmingham.
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Is it my fault if I do not look like an English girl and I do not talk like a Nigerian? Well, who says an English girl must have skin as pale as the clouds that float across her summers? Who says a Nigerian girl must speak in fallen English…?
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This thing with being lovers, it isn’t like being married.
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We leave it up to books and movies to talk about WWII on our behalf.
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Still shaking, in the pew, I understood that it isn’t the dead we cry for. We cry for ourselves, and I didn’t deserve my own pity.
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If I can’t write it would be as if I died.
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At this point in time the war [ WWII] is close enough to still feel hotly personal to a writer, yet far enough away so that jingoism and heroics are no longer required.
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And thus love makes fools of us all.
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I think bravery means a different thing to everyone.
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We no longer need to show people being brave: instead, we can examine how they became brave. We can assume that they didn’t start out that way. If we allow that they started out just like us, then their journey into courage becomes both more fascinating and more impressive.
CHRIS CLEAVE