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My paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the regional Blitz, in Birmingham.

Chris Cleave

I know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Fit Soul World
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
Yet war doesn’t end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Armistice Ends War
If I could not smile, I think my situation would be even more serious.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Serious Smile Thinking
There’s what people say, and there’s what people mean, and I like to explore the difference between the two.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Differences Mean Two
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
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

Ears Grief Moving
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
This thing with being lovers, it isn’t like being married.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Being Lovers Married
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Dating Grandmother Men
I’m not happy with just repeating myself.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Happy Just Not Repairing
Sometimes we don’t notice that someone is being brave, because they are only doing something that seems quite easy for us.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Brave Easy Sometimes
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
If I can’t write it would be as if I died.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Chasing Destroy Died Writing
Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive
CHRIS CLEAVE

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

Decision Interested People

My paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the regional Blitz, in Birmingham.

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My paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the regional Blitz, in Birmingham.

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