Even for a girl like me, then, there comes a day when she can stop surviving and start living. To survive, you have to look good or talk good. But to end your story well– here is the truth– you have to talk yourself out of it.
CHRIS CLEAVEIs 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…?
More Chris Cleave Quotes
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If I can’t write it would be as if I died.
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Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
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I know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.
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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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A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.
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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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WWII was, without exaggeration, the biggest event in all of human history, and it is still within living memory.
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I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn’t the most athletic guy at school.
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I think bravery means a different thing to everyone.
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Yet war doesn’t end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
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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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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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We leave it up to books and movies to talk about WWII on our behalf.
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We no longer need to show people being brave: instead, we can examine how they became brave. We can assume that they didn’t start out that way. If we allow that they started out just like us, then their journey into courage becomes both more fascinating and more impressive.
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And thus love makes fools of us all.
CHRIS CLEAVE