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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
The only bad days as a writer are the ones when you are too cowardly or too lazy to sit down at the keyboard and give it everything you have.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Bad Day Giving Lazy
I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn’t the most athletic guy at school.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Guy School Thinking
I’m always determined that as a novelist I’m going to go out there and research my characters very thoroughly before I start writing.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Character Research Writing
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
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
I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Built Woman Wreckage
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Enough Jingoism War
Is it my fault if I do not look like an English girl and I do not talk like a Nigerian? Well, who says an English girl must have skin as pale as the clouds that float across her summers? Who says a Nigerian girl must speak in fallen English…?
CHRIS CLEAVE

Clouds Girl Summer
A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Dying Mean Scar
If I could not smile, I think my situation would be even more serious.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Serious Smile Thinking
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Capes Names Running
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
Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive
CHRIS CLEAVE

Alive Mean Stories
We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Reality Refugee Summer
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
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
I know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Fit Soul World
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

Enemy War Writing
I’m a much better writer for being a father.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Being Better Father Much
I think bravery means a different thing to everyone.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Bravery Mean Thinking
Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Down Nobody Principles World
This thing with being lovers, it isn’t like being married.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Being Lovers Married
I’m not happy with just repeating myself.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Happy Just Not Repairing
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Girl Looks Stories
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

Ears Grief Moving
[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 CLEAVE

Children Teacher War

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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