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.
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”.
More Chris Cleave Quotes
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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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A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.
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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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If I can’t write it would be as if I died.
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Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive
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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.
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To be well in your mind you have first to be free.
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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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Andrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began.
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I’m really interested in people’s decisions.
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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.
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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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Yet war doesn’t end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
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I’m a much better writer for being a father.
CHRIS CLEAVE







