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 CLEAVENobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
More Chris Cleave Quotes
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Yet war doesn’t end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
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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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[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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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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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 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 know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.
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A scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.
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I’m a much better writer for being a father.
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Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive
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We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.
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Andrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began.
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We leave it up to books and movies to talk about WWII on our behalf.
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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.
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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.
CHRIS CLEAVE






