To be well in your mind you have first to be free.
CHRIS CLEAVEIf I could not smile, I think my situation would be even more serious.
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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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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Still 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.
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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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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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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
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A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.
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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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Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
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I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.
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I’m a much better writer for being a father.
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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.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
I 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 CLEAVE