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 CLEAVEYet war doesn’t end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
More Chris Cleave Quotes
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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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[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.
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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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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”.
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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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Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive
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I think bravery means a different thing to everyone.
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To be well in your mind you have first to be free.
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I know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.
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Horror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it.
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My paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the regional Blitz, in Birmingham.
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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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Things that we have to really dare ourselves to do come quite naturally to others.
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If I can’t write it would be as if I died.
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Yet war doesn’t end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
CHRIS CLEAVE