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.
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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Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive
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I’m a much better writer for being a father.
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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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This thing with being lovers, it isn’t like being married.
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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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My paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the regional Blitz, in Birmingham.
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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 know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.
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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.
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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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Yet war doesn’t end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
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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 were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.
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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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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.
CHRIS CLEAVE