That is how we lived, happily and without hope. I was very young then, and I did not miss having a future because I did not know I was entitled to one.
CHRIS CLEAVE[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.
More Chris Cleave Quotes
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Andrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
Even 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.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
My paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the regional Blitz, in Birmingham.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
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 -
We leave it up to books and movies to talk about WWII on our behalf.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
Sometimes we don’t notice that someone is being brave, because they are only doing something that seems quite easy for us.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
And thus love makes fools of us all.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
There’s what people say, and there’s what people mean, and I like to explore the difference between the two.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
Things that we have to really dare ourselves to do come quite naturally to others.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
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”.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE