[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 CLEAVENobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
More Chris Cleave Quotes
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To be well in your mind you have first to be free.
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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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I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.
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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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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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There’s what people say, and there’s what people mean, and I like to explore the difference between the two.
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I’m really interested in people’s decisions.
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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.
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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 paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the regional Blitz, in Birmingham.
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If I can’t write it would be as if I died.
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We leave it up to books and movies to talk about WWII on our behalf.
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A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.
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Yet war doesn’t end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
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This thing with being lovers, it isn’t like being married.
CHRIS CLEAVE