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.
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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WWII was, without exaggeration, the biggest event in all of human history, and it is still within living memory.
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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 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”.
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Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive
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I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.
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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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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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I’m not happy with just repeating myself.
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If I can’t write it would be as if I died.
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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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Psychiatry in this place is like serving an in-flight meal in the middle of a plane crash. If I wanted to make you well, as a doctor, I should be giving you a parachute, not a cheese-and-pickle sandwich.
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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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And thus love makes fools of us all.
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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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Yet war doesn’t end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
CHRIS CLEAVE






