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 CLEAVEWe 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.
More Chris Cleave Quotes
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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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We leave it up to books and movies to talk about WWII on our behalf.
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My paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the regional Blitz, in Birmingham.
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To be well in your mind you have first to be free.
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Yet war doesn’t end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
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Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive
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This thing with being lovers, it isn’t like being married.
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I think bravery means a different thing to everyone.
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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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Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
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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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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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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 know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.
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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.
CHRIS CLEAVE






