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We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.

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

Survivor Veteran Weight
I’m not happy with just repeating myself.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Happy Just Not Repairing
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
CHRIS CLEAVE

Bombs Horse Littles
I write in the novel’s afterword that our recent wars “finish not with victory or defeat but with a calendar draw-down date and a presumption that we shall never be reconciled with the enemy”.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Enemy War Writing
Andrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Andrew Began Inciosn People
If I could not smile, I think my situation would be even more serious.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Serious Smile Thinking
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Anger Hate Writing
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Cry Pity Understood
Things that we have to really dare ourselves to do come quite naturally to others.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Dare Refuge Understand
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

Alive Mean Stories
I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Built Woman Wreckage
I think all of us are intrigued to imagine what we as individuals would become, if we were ever tested as hard as that golden generation was.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Generations Golden Thinking
I’m a much better writer for being a father.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Being Better Father Much
If I can’t write it would be as if I died.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Chasing Destroy Died Writing
And thus love makes fools of us all.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Fool Love Make Thus
I know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Fit Soul World

We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.

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We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.

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Popular Authors

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