Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
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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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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If I could not smile, I think my situation would be even more serious.
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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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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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My paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the regional Blitz, in Birmingham.
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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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Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive. The next thing you know something fine will happen to her, something marvelous, and then she will turn around and smile.
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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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Yet war doesn’t end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
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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.
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I know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.
CHRIS CLEAVE