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Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.

Chris Cleave

To be well in your mind you have first to be free.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Firsts Mind Wells
My paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the regional Blitz, in Birmingham.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Ambulance Birmingham Grandmother
I’m not happy with just repeating myself.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Happy Just Not Repairing
Everyone carries the weight of WWII with them in their recent family history, and yet it is rarely spoken about within families, because veterans and survivors don’t tend to talk.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Survivor Veteran Weight
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Hope Missing Without Young
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Brave Journey People
A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Dying Mean Scar
Sometimes we don’t notice that someone is being brave, because they are only doing something that seems quite easy for us.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Brave Easy Sometimes
I’m a much better writer for being a father.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Being Better Father Much
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Dying Mean Thinking
If I can’t write it would be as if I died.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Chasing Destroy Died Writing
We leave it up to books and movies to talk about WWII on our behalf.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Behalf Books Movies
I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn’t the most athletic guy at school.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Guy School Thinking
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 CLEAVE

Bombs Horse Littles
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Cry Pity Understood
This thing with being lovers, it isn’t like being married.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Being Lovers Married

Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.

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Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.

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