My paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the regional Blitz, in Birmingham.
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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Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive
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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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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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To be well in your mind you have first to be free.
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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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Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
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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 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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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 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.
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I’m really interested in people’s decisions.
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I planned how I would kill myself in the time of Churchill (stand under bombs), Victoria (throw myself under a horse), and Henry the Eighth (marry Henry the Eighth)- Little Bee
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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.
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I’m a much better writer for being a father.
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A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.
CHRIS CLEAVE