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 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.
More Chris Cleave Quotes
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I think bravery means a different thing to everyone.
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We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.
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I’m really interested in people’s decisions.
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My paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the regional Blitz, in Birmingham.
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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.
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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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This thing with being lovers, it isn’t like being married.
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That is how we lived, happily and without hope. I was very young then, and I did not miss having a future because I did not know I was entitled to one.
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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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And thus love makes fools of us all.
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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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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.
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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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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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To be well in your mind you have first to be free.
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Yet war doesn’t end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
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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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I know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.
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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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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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Death, of course, is a refuge. It’s where you go when a new name, or a mask and cape, can no longer hide you from yourself. It’s where you run to when none of the principalities of your conscience will grant you asylum.
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I’m a much better writer for being a father.
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We leave it up to books and movies to talk about WWII on our behalf.
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[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.
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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 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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