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 CLEAVEWWII was, without exaggeration, the biggest event in all of human history, and it is still within living memory.
More Chris Cleave Quotes
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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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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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WWII was, without exaggeration, the biggest event in all of human history, and it is still within living memory.
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I think bravery means a different thing to everyone.
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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 in London during the Blitz. Indeed, the man she was dating before she met my grandfather was killed beside her in a cinema, in 1941, when a bomb came through the roof – a tragedy in which she herself was badly wounded.
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If I can’t write it would be as if I died.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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Yet war doesn’t end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
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Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
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We leave it up to books and movies to talk about WWII on our behalf.
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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.
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I’m really interested in people’s decisions.
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To be well in your mind you have first to be free.
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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.
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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.
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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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I’m a much better writer for being a father.
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Andrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began.
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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.
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My paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the regional Blitz, in Birmingham.
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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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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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