Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
CHRIS CLEAVENobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
CHRIS CLEAVEIf I can’t write it would be as if I died.
CHRIS CLEAVEMy paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the regional Blitz, in Birmingham.
CHRIS CLEAVEWe leave it up to books and movies to talk about WWII on our behalf.
CHRIS CLEAVEThere’s what people say, and there’s what people mean, and I like to explore the difference between the two.
CHRIS CLEAVEEven 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 CLEAVEI think bravery means a different thing to everyone.
CHRIS CLEAVEI 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”.
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.
CHRIS CLEAVEI know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.
CHRIS CLEAVEIs it my fault if I do not look like an English girl and I do not talk like a Nigerian? Well, who says an English girl must have skin as pale as the clouds that float across her summers? Who says a Nigerian girl must speak in fallen English…?
CHRIS CLEAVEAndrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began.
CHRIS CLEAVE[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.
CHRIS CLEAVEStill shaking, in the pew, I understood that it isn’t the dead we cry for. We cry for ourselves, and I didn’t deserve my own pity.
CHRIS CLEAVEPsychiatry 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.
CHRIS CLEAVESad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive. The next thing you know something fine will happen to her, something marvelous, and then she will turn around and smile.
CHRIS CLEAVE