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.
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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I’m really interested in people’s decisions.
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Andrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began.
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My paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the regional Blitz, in Birmingham.
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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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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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If I can’t write it would be as if I died.
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I think bravery means a different thing to everyone.
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If I could not smile, I think my situation would be even more serious.
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I think all of us are intrigued to imagine what we as individuals would become, if we were ever tested as hard as that golden generation was.
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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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Things that we have to really dare ourselves to do come quite naturally to others.
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I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.
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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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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.
CHRIS CLEAVE