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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.

Chris Cleave

I’m really interested in people’s decisions.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Decision Interested People
To be well in your mind you have first to be free.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Firsts Mind Wells
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”.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Enemy War Writing
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Hope Missing Without Young
I’m a much better writer for being a father.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Being Better Father Much
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Girl Looks Stories
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Enough Jingoism War
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Dying Mean Thinking
Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive
CHRIS CLEAVE

Alive Mean Stories
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 CLEAVE

Anger Hate Writing
Yet war doesn’t end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Armistice Ends War
Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Down Nobody Principles World
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
CHRIS CLEAVE

Bombs Horse Littles
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
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Alive Mean Stories
WWII was, without exaggeration, the biggest event in all of human history, and it is still within living memory.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Events Memories Wwii

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Chris Cleave Quotes