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[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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We leave it up to books and movies to talk about WWII on our behalf.
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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.
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To be well in your mind you have first to be free.
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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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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 thing with being lovers, it isn’t like being married.
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Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
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I’m a much better writer for being a father.
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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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I’m not happy with just repeating myself.
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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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Things that we have to really dare ourselves to do come quite naturally to others.
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I know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.
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I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn’t the most athletic guy at school.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.
CHRIS CLEAVE