At this point in time the war [ WWII] is close enough to still feel hotly personal to a writer, yet far enough away so that jingoism and heroics are no longer required.
CHRIS CLEAVEStill 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.
More Chris Cleave Quotes
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We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.
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I’m a much better writer for being a father.
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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 am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.
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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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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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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.
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If I could not smile, I think my situation would be even more serious.
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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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That is how we lived, happily and without hope. I was very young then, and I did not miss having a future because I did not know I was entitled to one.
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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.
CHRIS CLEAVE -
I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn’t the most athletic guy at school.
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This thing with being lovers, it isn’t like being married.
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Things that we have to really dare ourselves to do come quite naturally to others.
CHRIS CLEAVE