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 CLEAVESad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive
More Chris Cleave Quotes
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I’m really interested in people’s decisions.
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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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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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Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive
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A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.
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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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We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.
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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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If I can’t write it would be as if I died.
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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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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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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 know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.
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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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WWII was, without exaggeration, the biggest event in all of human history, and it is still within living memory.
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This thing with being lovers, it isn’t like being married.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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To be well in your mind you have first to be free.
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Things that we have to really dare ourselves to do come quite naturally to others.
CHRIS CLEAVE