We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.
CHRIS CLEAVEStill 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.
More Chris Cleave Quotes
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I know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.
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I’m a much better writer for being a father.
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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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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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Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
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I’m not happy with just repeating myself.
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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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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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WWII was, without exaggeration, the biggest event in all of human history, and it is still within living memory.
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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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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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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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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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Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive
CHRIS CLEAVE