We leave it up to books and movies to talk about WWII on our behalf.
CHRIS CLEAVE[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.
More Chris Cleave Quotes
-
-
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 -
I’m really interested in people’s decisions.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
I know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
Yet war doesn’t end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive
CHRIS CLEAVE -
We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
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 -
Things that we have to really dare ourselves to do come quite naturally to others.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
I think bravery means a different thing to everyone.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
I’m a much better writer for being a father.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
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 -
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
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