I think bravery means a different thing to everyone.
CHRIS CLEAVEI think bravery means a different thing to everyone.
CHRIS CLEAVESad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive
CHRIS CLEAVEA scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.
CHRIS CLEAVESad 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.
CHRIS CLEAVEThe 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.
CHRIS CLEAVEWe leave it up to books and movies to talk about WWII on our behalf.
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.
CHRIS CLEAVEHorror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it.
CHRIS CLEAVEI 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”.
CHRIS CLEAVEThe 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.
CHRIS CLEAVEWe 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.
CHRIS CLEAVEThis thing with being lovers, it isn’t like being married.
CHRIS CLEAVEYet war doesn’t end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
CHRIS CLEAVEAnd thus love makes fools of us all.
CHRIS CLEAVEI 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 CLEAVEI am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.
CHRIS CLEAVE