And thus love makes fools of us all.
CHRIS CLEAVEMy 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.
More Chris Cleave Quotes
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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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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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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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I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn’t the most athletic guy at school.
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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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I’m not happy with just repeating myself.
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We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.
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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 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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This thing with being lovers, it isn’t like being married.
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Is it my fault if I do not look like an English girl and I do not talk like a Nigerian? Well, who says an English girl must have skin as pale as the clouds that float across her summers? Who says a Nigerian girl must speak in fallen English…?
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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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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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Yet war doesn’t end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
CHRIS CLEAVE