Chris Cleave Quotes

So when I say that I am a refugee, you must understand that there is no refuge.

A scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.

Looking after a very sick child was the Olympics of parenting.

A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.

At some point you just have to turn around and face your life head on.

I’m telling you, trouble is like the ocean. It covers two thirds of the world.

Our own personal brand of courage - in relationships, in conflict, in our principles ­ - is as unique as our fingerprints.

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.

We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, 'I survived'.

It is certainly impossible to imagine forgiving the enemy while their animus remains undefeated.

We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.

Yet war doesn't end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.

If your face is swollen from the severe beatings of life, smile and pretend to be a fat man.

Life is extremely short and you cannot dance to current affairs.

At this point in time the war [ WWII] is close enough to still feel hotly personal to a writer, yet far enough away so that jingoism and heroics are no longer required.

I was carrying two cargoes. Yes, one of them was horror, but the other one was hope.

It was the month of May and there was warm sunshine dripping through the holes between the clouds, like the sky was a broken blue bowl and a child was trying to keep honey in it.

Our stories are the tellers of us.

I like to push characters to extremes so they have to make really tough decisions and there is no life more extreme than that of an athlete.

We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.

The ways in which we are able to express courage also depend on the hand life deals us.

My paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the regional Blitz, in Birmingham.

It was hard not to be full of hope

In my world death will come chasing. In your world it will start whispering in your ear to destroy yourself. I know this because it started whispering to me when I was in the detention center.

Andrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began.

I do think it is harder to acknowledge our strengths, or to forgive ourselves and each other for our shortcomings, when there has not been a result we can all agree on.

We're often told that we live in a globalized world, and we talk about it all the time, but people don't stop to think about what it means.

It is easier for a rich person to act on their principles than it is for someone with fewer choices (which is why it is all the more disappointing when a wealthy person plays to the crowd).

I think that the relationship between two top-level athletes who are rivals is one of the most fascinating human relationships to explore. It's always one atom away from being a tragedy.

This thing with being lovers, it isn't like being married.

There's what people say, and there's what people mean, and I like to explore the difference between the two.

In a few breaths' time I will speak some sad words to you. But you must hear them the same way we have agreed to see scars now. Sad words are just another beauty.

If I can't write it would be as if I died.

Life is savagely unfair. It ignores our deep-seated convictions and places a disproportionate emphasis on the decisions we make in split seconds.

My whole life is my work.

Things that we have to really dare ourselves to do come quite naturally to others.

To be well in your mind you have first to be free.

However long the moon disappears, someday it must shine again.

I'm not happy with just repeating myself.

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".

[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.

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

We don't know our hearts until life puts us to the test, and WWII fascinates because it was the last time everyone was simultaneously pushed to their limit.

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.

I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.

If I could not smile, I think my situation would be even more serious.

I know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.

People wonder how they are ever going to change their lives, but really it is frighteningly easy.

And thus love makes fools of us all.

Studying psychology is fun because you're always looking for the same things I think a writer should be looking for, which is the story behind the story.