[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.
CHRIS CLEAVEAndrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began.
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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If I could not smile, I think my situation would be even more serious.
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Andrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began.
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We leave it up to books and movies to talk about WWII on our behalf.
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A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.
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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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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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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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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 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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Yet war doesn’t end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
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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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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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This is the forked tongue of grief again. It whispers in one ear: return to what you once loved best, and in the other ear it whispers, move on.
CHRIS CLEAVE