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
CHRIS CLEAVEIf I can’t write it would be as if I died.
More Chris Cleave Quotes
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I know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.
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Things that we have to really dare ourselves to do come quite naturally to others.
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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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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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Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive
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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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WWII was, without exaggeration, the biggest event in all of human history, and it is still within living memory.
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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 think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn’t the most athletic guy at school.
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This is the forked tongue of grief again. It whispers in one ear: return to what you once loved best, and in the other ear it whispers, move on.
CHRIS CLEAVE