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[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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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”.
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Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive
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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.
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I know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.
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And thus love makes fools of us all.
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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.
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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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My paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the regional Blitz, in Birmingham.
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Yet war doesn’t end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
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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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Sometimes we don’t notice that someone is being brave, because they are only doing something that seems quite easy for us.
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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.
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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.
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There’s what people say, and there’s what people mean, and I like to explore the difference between the two.
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If I could not smile, I think my situation would be even more serious.
CHRIS CLEAVE