There’s what people say, and there’s what people mean, and I like to explore the difference between the two.
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 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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I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.
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My paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the regional Blitz, in Birmingham.
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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 know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.
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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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Psychiatry in this place is like serving an in-flight meal in the middle of a plane crash. If I wanted to make you well, as a doctor, I should be giving you a parachute, not a cheese-and-pickle sandwich.
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Yet war doesn’t end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
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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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I’m really interested in people’s decisions.
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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 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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Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive
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To be well in your mind you have first to be free.
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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.
CHRIS CLEAVE







