I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.
CHRIS CLEAVEHorror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it.
More Chris Cleave Quotes
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If I could not smile, I think my situation would be even more serious.
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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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Things that we have to really dare ourselves to do come quite naturally to others.
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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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My paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the regional Blitz, in Birmingham.
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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 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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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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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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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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[My maternal grandmother ] was a teacher in London and elsewhere during the war, although the children she taught were not the “lost children” who feature in the novel – those come from my research.
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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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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.
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To be well in your mind you have first to be free.
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We leave it up to books and movies to talk about WWII on our behalf.
CHRIS CLEAVE