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[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
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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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We leave it up to books and movies to talk about WWII on our behalf.
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I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.
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Horror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from 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 thing with being lovers, it isn’t like being married.
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We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.
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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.
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If I could not smile, I think my situation would be even more serious.
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Things that we have to really dare ourselves to do come quite naturally to others.
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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…?
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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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To be well in your mind you have first to be free.
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And thus love makes fools of us all.
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A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.
CHRIS CLEAVE