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.
CHRIS CLEAVEA 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.
More Chris Cleave Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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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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…?
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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.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
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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I think bravery means a different thing to everyone.
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If I could not smile, I think my situation would be even more serious.
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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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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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I know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.
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Yet war doesn’t end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
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I’m not happy with just repeating myself.
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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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If I can’t write it would be as if I died.
CHRIS CLEAVE