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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.

Chris Cleave

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

Down Nobody Principles World
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 CLEAVE

Anger Hate Writing
[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.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Children Teacher War
If I could not smile, I think my situation would be even more serious.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Serious Smile Thinking
And thus love makes fools of us all.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Fool Love Make Thus
A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Dying Mean Scar
Horror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Country Horror Suffering
Things that we have to really dare ourselves to do come quite naturally to others.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Dare Refuge Understand
I’m not happy with just repeating myself.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Happy Just Not Repairing
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Brave Journey People
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Dating Grandmother Men
Andrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Andrew Began Inciosn People
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Ears Grief Moving
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.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Girl Looks 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”.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Enemy War Writing
There’s what people say, and there’s what people mean, and I like to explore the difference between the two.
CHRIS CLEAVE

Differences Mean Two

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Chris Cleave Quotes