[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 CLEAVETo be well in your mind you have first to be free.
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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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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If I can’t write it would be as if I died.
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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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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.
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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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And thus love makes fools of us all.
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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.
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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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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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My paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the regional Blitz, in Birmingham.
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Andrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began.
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I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.
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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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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