If I could not smile, I think my situation would be even more serious.
CHRIS CLEAVEMy 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.
More Chris Cleave Quotes
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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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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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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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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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I’m not happy with just repeating myself.
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Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
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We leave it up to books and movies to talk about WWII on our behalf.
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There’s what people say, and there’s what people mean, and I like to explore the difference between the two.
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We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.
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Death, of course, is a refuge. It’s where you go when a new name, or a mask and cape, can no longer hide you from yourself. It’s where you run to when none of the principalities of your conscience will grant you asylum.
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And thus love makes fools of us all.
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Horror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it.
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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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Yet war doesn’t end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
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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.
CHRIS CLEAVE