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 CLEAVEPsychiatry 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.
More Chris Cleave Quotes
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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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If I can’t write it would be as if I died.
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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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I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn’t the most athletic guy at school.
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To be well in your mind you have first to be free.
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A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.
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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…?
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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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Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive
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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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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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This thing with being lovers, it isn’t like being married.
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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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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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And thus love makes fools of us all.
CHRIS CLEAVE