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.
CHRIS CLEAVEI am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.
More Chris Cleave Quotes
-
-
A scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
Everyone carries the weight of WWII with them in their recent family history, and yet it is rarely spoken about within families, because veterans and survivors don’t tend to talk.
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 -
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.
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 -
We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
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 -
I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
Yet war doesn’t end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
I’m really interested in people’s decisions.
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 -
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 -
I’m a much better writer for being a father.
CHRIS CLEAVE