Chris Cleave Quotes

That is the trouble with happiness-all of it is built on top of something that men want.

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.

Courage is a muscle that develops through use. It's no use waiting for some inner fire to conveniently become apparent at the moment of crisis - that's cartoon stuff.

I'm really interested in people's decisions.

I'm a much better writer for being a father.

The future looks like gasoline. . . . crude oil . . . is the future before it has been refined. It is like a dream of the future, really, and like any dream it ends with a rude awakening.

Something I am now convinced of, after researching Everyone Brave, is that none of us is born courageous in all respects.

I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn't the most athletic guy at school.

The Daily Mail can't say 'asylum-seeker' without saying 'foreign criminal' in the same sentence. I'm sure it's practically editorial policy.

Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive

I think bravery means a different thing to everyone.

Sometimes we don't notice that someone is being brave, because they are only doing something that seems quite easy for us.

WWII was, without exaggeration, the biggest event in all of human history, and it is still within living memory.

Everyone carries the weight of WWII with them in their recent family history, and yet it is rarely spoken about within families, because veterans and survivors don't tend to talk.

There was no quick grief for Andrew because he had been so slowly lost. First from my heart, then from my mind, and only finally from my life.

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.

We leave it up to books and movies to talk about WWII on our behalf.

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

We must constantly dare ourselves in the small things, until courage becomes a habit of mind that will serve us when we are unexpectedly tested.

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.

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.

You travel here and you travel there, trying to get out from under the cloud, and nothing works, and then one day you realize you've been carrying the weather around with you.

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

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.

on a bike ride through the Surrey Lanes, pedalling in my cotton dress through the hot fields blushing with poppies, freewheeling down a sudden dip into a cool wooded sanctum.

This helpful war. It makes us better people and then it tries to kill us.

Everything can be restored. If one won't believe that, how does one endure all this?

There in the sweet sacking smell of the mail bags he understood that he was dying, and it pleased him that he was going in the company of so many soft words home.

Then I’m tempted to die just to … spite him.”“That’s the spirit that will win us the war.

The first problem of war was that no one was any good at it yet.

I suppose we ought to be getting home, in any case.”“Oh god, is it wartime already?”“Look on the bright side: it’ll be dinner when we get back.

She knew, now, why her father had not spoken of the last war, nor Alistair of his. It was hardly fair on the living.

People spoke in whispers, as if the war was listening

They spoke of small things at first, since it was best, when reattaching threads, to begin with the easiest knots.

But what good is it to teach a child to count, if you don't show him that he counts for something?

One could always imagine that one's life, though smoldering in parts, might be undamaged in the west.

Life took longer to reassemble than it did to blow apart, but that didn't mean it wouldn't be lovely, providing that one remembered to go for country walks, and to tune the wireless to music.

You are a mousetrap of a friend, all soft cheese and hard springs

Exposing corruption, brandishing truth.

I want to be a journalist again. I want to make a difference in the world.

What is the good of influence if one can only use it on strangers?

Murder me with bombs you poor lonely sod I will only build myself again and stronger. I am too stupid to know better I am a woman built on the wreckage of myself.

The true moments of one's life were sadder for the fact that they must always be synchronized with the ordinary: with rail timetables, with breaks in traffic.

There are countries of the world, and regions of one's own mind, where it is unwise to travel.

Let them say whatever gives them comfort.

I understand that your brain is large and perpetually at war with itself

...disaster, when it is quite sure of its own strength, will announce itself by hardly moving its lips...

When you make a man ashamed, you make him dangerous.

This life is a deafening roar but listen. You could hear a pin drop.

How well it had suited me, that absolute license to march up to evildoers and demand who, what, where, when and why?