WWII was, without exaggeration, the biggest event in all of human history, and it is still within living memory.
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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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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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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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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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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This thing with being lovers, it isn’t like being married.
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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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Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive
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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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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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I’m not happy with just repeating myself.
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I’m really interested in people’s decisions.
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And thus love makes fools of us all.
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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 am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.
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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.
CHRIS CLEAVE






