black
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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.

Chris Cleave

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

Bad Day Giving Lazy
There’s what people say, and there’s what people mean, and I like to explore the difference between the two.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Differences Mean Two
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 CLEAVE

Dating Grandmother Men
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 CLEAVE

Clouds Girl Summer
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Ears Grief Moving
We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Reality Refugee Summer
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Character Research Writing
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Brave Journey People
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

Survivor Veteran Weight
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Capes Names Running
To be well in your mind you have first to be free.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Firsts Mind Wells
Andrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Andrew Began Inciosn People
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Stories Talking Writing
Sometimes we don’t notice that someone is being brave, because they are only doing something that seems quite easy for us.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Brave Easy Sometimes
Horror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Country Horror Suffering
A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Dying Mean Scar

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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