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 CLEAVEI think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn’t the most athletic guy at school.
More Chris Cleave Quotes
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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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Even for a girl like me, then, there comes a day when she can stop surviving and start living. To survive, you have to look good or talk good. But to end your story well– here is the truth– you have to talk yourself out of it.
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I think all of us are intrigued to imagine what we as individuals would become, if we were ever tested as hard as that golden generation was.
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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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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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Things that we have to really dare ourselves to do come quite naturally to others.
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We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.
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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.
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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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Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
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I’m a much better writer for being a father.
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Yet war doesn’t end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
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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.
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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