black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

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”.

Chris Cleave

Is it my fault if I do not look like an English girl and I do not talk like a Nigerian? Well, who says an English girl must have skin as pale as the clouds that float across her summers? Who says a Nigerian girl must speak in fallen English…?
CHRIS CLEAVE

Clouds Girl Summer
Things that we have to really dare ourselves to do come quite naturally to others.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Dare Refuge Understand
Andrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Andrew Began Inciosn People
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Doctors Giving Pickles
My paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the regional Blitz, in Birmingham.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Ambulance Birmingham Grandmother
The 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 CLEAVE

Bad Day Giving Lazy
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Character Research Writing
If I could not smile, I think my situation would be even more serious.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Serious Smile Thinking
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Survivor Veteran Weight
Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Down Nobody Principles World
If I can’t write it would be as if I died.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Chasing Destroy Died Writing
Still 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 CLEAVE

Cry Pity Understood
To be well in your mind you have first to be free.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Firsts Mind Wells
I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn’t the most athletic guy at school.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Guy School Thinking
I know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Fit Soul World
Sad 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 CLEAVE

Alive Mean Stories

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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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”.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Chris Cleave Quotes