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.
CHRIS CLEAVEThe 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.
More Chris Cleave Quotes
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And thus love makes fools of us all.
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I know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.
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I’m a much better writer for being a father.
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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
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A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.
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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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I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.
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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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To be well in your mind you have first to be free.
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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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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.
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I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.
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I think all of us are intrigued to imagine what we as individuals would become, if we were ever tested as hard as that golden generation was.
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Andrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began.
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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.
CHRIS CLEAVE