I think bravery means a different thing to everyone.
CHRIS CLEAVEEven for a girl like me, then, there comes a day when she can stop surviving and start living. To survive, you have to look good or talk good. But to end your story well– here is the truth– you have to talk yourself out of it.
More Chris Cleave Quotes
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The reason why I love people, and writing about them, is because they don’t always respond with hate and anger. If they did I wouldn’t have a story to tell. Who wants to know about someone who was brutalised and became brutal? I’m interested in the exceptions.
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Sometimes we don’t notice that someone is being brave, because they are only doing something that seems quite easy for us.
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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 could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
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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I’m a much better writer for being a father.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
My paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the regional Blitz, in Birmingham.
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This thing with being lovers, it isn’t like being married.
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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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[My maternal grandmother ] was a teacher in London and elsewhere during the war, although the children she taught were not the “lost children” who feature in the novel – those come from my research.
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And thus love makes fools of us all.
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The only bad days as a writer are the ones when you are too cowardly or too lazy to sit down at the keyboard and give it everything you have.
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If I could not smile, I think my situation would be even more serious.
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To be well in your mind you have first to be free.
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Things that we have to really dare ourselves to do come quite naturally to others.
CHRIS CLEAVE