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.
CHRIS CLEAVEEveryone 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.
More Chris Cleave Quotes
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I’m really interested in people’s decisions.
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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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A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.
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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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I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn’t the most athletic guy at school.
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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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If I could not smile, I think my situation would be even more serious.
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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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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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I’m a much better writer for being a father.
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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.
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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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Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
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We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.
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Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive
CHRIS CLEAVE