Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Chris Cleave, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Chris Cleave quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 188 Chris Cleave quotes for you to read and share.
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
We are a nation of glorious cowards, ready to battle any evil but our own." Her -- Chris Cleave
You ever wonder why an East Eng girl like me hasn't got much in the way of family? Well here's the reasons Petra. World War 1. World War 2. Falklands War. Gulf War 1. Gulf War 2 and the War on Drugs. You can take your pick because I've lost whole bloody chunks of my family in all of them. -- Chris Cleave
The mourners clustered around the edge of the grave, paralyzed by the horror of this thing, this first discovery of death that was worse than the death itself. -- Chris Cleave
If I were you," Tom said, "I should stick to reading, writing and arithmetic." "But what good is it to teach a child to count, if you don't show him that he counts for something?" Tom held up his hands. "I'm sorry, you're losing me." Mary exhaled smoke. "Possibly I am. -- Chris Cleave
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. -- Chris Cleave
Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive. The next thing you know something fine will happen to her, something marvelous, and then she will turn around and smile. -- Chris Cleave
When death comes you do not stay for one minute in the place it has visited. Many things arrive after death-sadness, questions, and policemen- and none of these can be answered when your papers are not in order. -- Chris Cleave
They say that in the hour before an earthquake the clouds hang leaden in the sky, the winds slows to a hot breath, and the birds fall quiet in the trees of the town square. Yes but these are the same portents that precede lunchtime, frankly. -- Chris Cleave
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. -- Chris Cleave
We have our agreement about scars, I know, but this time I looked away because sometime you can see too much beauty. -- Chris Cleave
I know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul. -- Chris Cleave
There are no goats. That is why you have all these beautiful flowers." "There were goats, in your village?" "Yes, and they ate all the flowers." "I'm sorry." "Do not be sorry. We ate all the goats. -- Chris Cleave
So when I say that I am a refugee, you must understand that there is no refuge. -- Chris Cleave
In the quiet of the garden then the robin shook his worm, and swallowed its life from the light into darkness with the quick indifference of a god. -- Chris Cleave
The only reason we were married in such haste was that my mother begged me not to marry Andrew at all. One of you in a marriage has to be soft, she said. One of you has to know how to say, Have it your way. That's not going to be you, dear, so it might as well be the man. -- Chris Cleave
This thing with being lovers, it isn't like being married. -- Chris Cleave
[Sarah has had the middle finger of her left hand amputated] and she says that when she types:
I can't rely on E,D, and C anymore. They go missing when I need them most. Pleased becomes please. Ecstasies becomes stasis. -- Chris Cleave
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. -- Chris Cleave
If I was telling this story to the girls from back home, I would have to explain to them how it was possible to be drowning in a river of people and also feel so very, very alone. -- Chris Cleave
My whole life is my work. -- Chris Cleave
In the end I suppose we lay flowers on a grave because we cannot lay ourselves on it. -- Chris Cleave
Do you remember back when you felt you could actually do something to make the world better?" "You're talking to the wrong man. I work for central government, remember? Actually doing something is the mistake we're trained to avoid. -- Chris Cleave
Perhaps this was what love was like after all- not the lurch of going over a humpback bridge, and not the incandescence of fireworks, just the quiet understanding that one should take a kind hand when it was offered, before all light was gone from the sky. -- Chris Cleave
I'm really interested in people's decisions. -- Chris Cleave
What he had not understood, before battle, was that time could become a ribbon to be looped and pinned back to its center, the petals of a black rosette. I -- Chris Cleave
lips, excused from their color, had formed words relieved of their sound. -- Chris Cleave
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 ... ? -- Chris Cleave
Come to Me and we will blow the world back together WITH INCREDIBLE NOISE AND FURY. -- Chris Cleave
If one kept the great yellow mounds of smashed brick in the corner of one's eye, then the mind understood them as the contours of nature and forgot its trick of making one unhappy. -- Chris Cleave
I looked around me at the beautiful sunrise and I was thinking, Yes, yes, everything will be beautiful like this now. I will never be afraid again. I will never spend another day trapped in the color gray. -- Chris Cleave
Me and Nkiruka, we watched through the window until the moon grew an extraordinary size, so big that it filled the window frame. We could see the face of the man in the moon, so close that we could see the madness in his eyes. -- Chris Cleave
I move we get more wine,' Alistair said. 'What does the panel think?' ...
It was obvious that the entire war could be solved in this way. The trick would be to reach for a corkscrew instead, every time some brass hat ordered artillery. -- Chris Cleave
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. -- Chris Cleave
There was something about the star, rising above the stable, that still pulled a crowd in from the fields. -- Chris Cleave
London had always had this trick of living in two time signatures at once - the urgent and the always - each in earshot of the other. -- Chris Cleave
Yu can't live if yu dead, neither. Yu probly too smart to get dat. -- Chris Cleave
Look, do you believe in the institution of marriage?" "Of course." "And you accept that such beautiful lightning cannot strike you twice?" "Well yes, I suppose - " "Then shouldn't you get a ring on her as soon as possible? -- Chris Cleave
They spoke of small things at first, since it was best, when reattaching threads, to begin with the easiest knots. -- Chris Cleave
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. - Little Bee -- Chris Cleave
Occurred to him that no one who hadn't been in battle could know what things were worth. -- Chris Cleave
If your face is swollen from the severe beatings of life, smile and pretend to be a fat man. -- Chris Cleave
I do not think you are wrong for living the life you were born in. A dog must be a dog and a wolf must be a wolf, that is the proverb in my county -- Chris Cleave
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. -- Chris Cleave
Every bitter joule of rage had been converted into speed. She was empty. There was no pain. The air whistled past her ears. She listened intently. That silent music was all there was. It was the sound of the universe showing her mercy. -- Chris Cleave
Looking after a very sick child was the Olympics of parenting. -- Chris Cleave
You are a mousetrap of a friend, all soft cheese and hard springs -- Chris Cleave
who, what, where, when, and why? -- Chris Cleave
What's he like?" "Thoughtful. Interesting. Compassionate." "These are English words for ugly. -- Chris Cleave
It was not warm and not cold. There was no wind and the sky was very low and grey but it wasn't raining. It was like they'd completely run out of weather. -- Chris Cleave
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. -- Chris Cleave
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
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. -- Chris Cleave
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 ... -- Chris Cleave
LIFE is a big word, isn't it? Let's break it down into small segments. Let's find a level of granularity we can plan around; we could say we'll take it a month at a time, or a week at a time, and treat each of those modules almost as training units. -- Chris Cleave
Oh, I hope I don't teach. Because look what we did: we saved the zoo animals and the nice children, and we damned the afflicted and the blacks. You know what I do every day in that classroom? I do everything in my power to make sure those poor souls won't learn the obvious lesson. -- Chris Cleave
I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself. -- Chris Cleave
The heart was a bicameral thing, both stoical and skittish. Who was to say that it mightn't endure the years of separation and the abrupt reversals of fate, only to be repulsed by a misaligned vase, by a lipsticked tooth, by a hundredth of an ounce of ash? -- Chris Cleave
Her mother set to with the hairbrush again. "But would that be so awful, darling? To be the prettiest thing in Brimscombe-and-Thrupp?"
"I should rather die."
"You nearly did."
"Yes, but I tend to blame the Germans. -- Chris Cleave
I'm not happy with just repeating myself. -- Chris Cleave
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. -- Chris Cleave
If I could not smile, I think my situation would be even more serious. -- Chris Cleave
I'm a much better writer for being a father. -- Chris Cleave
I was hoping my life might make more sense from a great height. -- Chris Cleave
You may think that's funny Osama but you never can squeeze every last bit of pride out of a human being. It's like a tube of toothpaste. You can twist it and you can crush it but there's always a tiny bit left isn't there? -- Chris Cleave
There are countries of the world, and regions of one's own mind, where it is unwise to travel. -- Chris Cleave
There was extraordinary pain behind the ordinary nouns. -- Chris Cleave
It was depression that killed Andrew, of course - depression and guilt. But my son didn't believe in death, let alone in the capacity of mere emotions to cause it. -- Chris Cleave
To be in love was to understand how alone one had been before. It was to know that if one were ever alone again, there would be no exemption from the agony of it. It wasn't the happiest feeling. -- Chris Cleave
London was perfectly prepared to give him a night out of anywhere on earth, and yet all he asked was to come home. -- Chris Cleave
We looked as if we'd been cobbled together in Photoshop, the three of us, walking to my husband's funeral. One white middle-class mother, one skinny black refugee girl, and one small Dark Knight from Gotham City. -- Chris Cleave
There's eight million people here pretending the others aren't getting on their nerves. I believe it's called civilization. -- Chris Cleave
I am a woman built on the wreckage of herself, Narrator -- Chris Cleave
Putting down the power right from the whistle would be ugly and brutal, but it would get the job done. He wanted to tell her that, but this was the thing with coaching: you had to step back at exactly the moment you ached to step forward. -- Chris Cleave
Perhaps life just turned a person who tried harder into a person who felt they must write it on someone else's report. -- Chris Cleave
It was how mothers carried on, after all, with a glint in the eye that implied a sure clairvoyance and also that it was your turn to talk. This was the velvet rope mothers offered: enough silence to make a noose with. Mary -- Chris Cleave
To be well in your mind you have first to be free. -- Chris Cleave
To have faith - that a lover would be constant and life clement - this did require courage in a city more disposed to beginnings than safe continuations. -- Chris Cleave
Horror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it. -- Chris Cleave
Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles. -- Chris Cleave
Yu only be livin one life, darlin. Don't matter yu don't uh-preshie-ate part of it, cos it don't stop bein part of yu. -- Chris Cleave
How could he even attempt it, after eight days and nights of bombing? And yet this is when he must write: now, in the lull between attacks...War made one do everything when one wasn't at all ready. Dying, yes, but also living. -- Chris Cleave
In the history of the world there was not one example of a man ever having written a satisfactory letter to a woman who mattered to him. -- Chris Cleave
Lord," he said, "on this holiest of days, we thank you for food and ammunition. May our ships get through and the enemy's get lost." They all said "Amen" and then the orderlies brought in something that the cook had made out of bread crumbs and canned malevolence. Alistair -- Chris Cleave
He reached out a hand behind the headrest of his seat and Kate took it, and they squeezed. The pressure created a fixed point in time, to which so many accelerating events could be anchored. -- Chris Cleave
Life is savagely unfair. It ignores our deep-seated convictions and places a disproportionate emphasis on the decisions we make in split seconds. -- Chris Cleave
Sometimes
in the rare moments when she wasn't causing quite serious mental discomfort
being friends with Zoe was like being knocked dizzy by grace. -- Chris Cleave
April showers bring May flowers -- Chris Cleave
I thought there'd be some black people." "Hitler will only fight them in separate units. He's a snob. -- Chris Cleave
At one point he had covered more than seven tenths of the earth's surface. -- Chris Cleave
Everything can be restored. If one won't believe that, how does one endure all this? -- Chris Cleave
People wonder how they are ever going to change their lives, but really it is frighteningly easy. -- Chris Cleave
The sweetness of the blackberries revealed itself incompletely, changing and deepening until it dissolved from the back of the tongue with the maddening hint of a greater remainder. He was left with a question he could not phrase, and a galaxy of tiny seeds that tantalized the tongue. -- Chris Cleave
Her life was one endless loop that she raced around, with steep banked curves so she could never change or slow down. It just delivered her back to herself, over and over and over. -- Chris Cleave
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
I suppose all of us have to look at our job and ask how it now serves the cause I suppose one is lucky if a simple answer presents itself. -- Chris Cleave
Death, finally, was British; life chaotic and foreign. The -- Chris Cleave
Because this is how it was with them: the boy's father had dark skin, darker even than my own, and the boy's mother was a white woman. They were holding hands and smiling at their boy, whose skin was light brown. It was the color of the man and the woman joined in happiness. It -- Chris Cleave
There was less of him now. There was less of them all. Officers and men dragged themselves around in uniforms three sizes too big, new holes punched into every belt, every collar hanging loose. They were a garrison of skinny boys performing a play about soldiers. -- Chris Cleave
This helpful war. It makes us better people and then it tries to kill us. -- Chris Cleave
When the hour had come for the war to take him away, that had been the first and last moment she had known without doubt that she loved him. One knew how one felt only when things ended. And -- Chris Cleave
The good days are when you perform; the slow days are when you learn to perform better. 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. -- Chris Cleave
It was an air one might still breathe, if everyone forgiven was brave. -- Chris Cleave
Yes but he is a man though, don't you see? You could knit one quicker than you can make one fit off-the-shelf. -- Chris Cleave
Life is extremely short and you cannot dance to current affairs. -- Chris Cleave
He really had experienced every tiniest increment of time in the four decades since then, and yet here he was surprised to be suddenly old and crippled. Turned out the rope didn't care if you noticed every daisy on the path to the gallows. -- Chris Cleave
For me and the girls from my village, horror is a disease and we are sick with it. It is not an illness you can cure yourself of by standing up and letting the big red cinema seat fold itself up behind you. -- Chris Cleave
You know what worries me about the enemy? It's the violence. It is almost as if he thinks he can solve every problem this way. -- Chris Cleave
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. -- Chris Cleave
You are not dumb, Yevette. All of us who have got this far, all of us who have survived- how can we be dumb? Dumb could not come this far,I am telling you. -- Chris Cleave
This was how a kind heart broke, after all: inward, making no shrapnel. Dear -- Chris Cleave
She knew, now, why her father had not spoken of the last war, nor Alistair of his. It was hardly fair on the living. -- Chris Cleave
A scar means, I survived. -- Chris Cleave
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
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. -- Chris Cleave
One could always imagine that one's life, though smoldering in parts, might be undamaged in the west. -- Chris Cleave
You're not asking for input. You are asking your admirer's to prove they are paying attention. -- Chris Cleave
We did not have hurry. We did not have electricity or fresh water or sadness either, because none of these had been connected to our village yet. -- Chris Cleave
Oh, you know. The lingering sensation that in pursuit of my own exacting goals and objectives I might not have been as generous in spirit as I could have been with regard to the needs and dreams of the people I cared most about or for whom I was emotionally responsible. -- Chris Cleave
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. -- Chris Cleave
It is possible to do good things with an imperfect situation. -- Chris Cleave
Once when we stopped to rest, she dug her toes into the earth at the edge of a field and smiled. When I saw her smile, I felt strong enough to carry on.. -- Chris Cleave
Peace is a time when people can tell each other their real names -- Chris Cleave
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. -- Chris Cleave
I was brought up to believe that everyone brave is forgiven, but in wartime courage is cheap and clemency out of season. Unless -- Chris Cleave
It is good to live like this. Once you are ready to die, you do not suffer so badly from the horror. -- Chris Cleave
We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves. -- Chris Cleave
I realized that I was carrying two cargoes. Yes, one of them was horror, but the other one was hope. I realized I had killed myself back to life. -- Chris Cleave
A girl like me gets stopped at immigration. -- Chris Cleave
April showers bring May flower -- Chris Cleave
Let them say whatever gives them comfort. -- Chris Cleave
That is the trouble with happiness-all of it is built on top of something that men want. -- Chris Cleave
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. -- Chris Cleave
All the things we make exceptional are merely borrowed from the mundane and must without warning be surrendered to it. -- Chris Cleave
At some point you just have to turn around and face your life head on. -- Chris Cleave
I think that there's something extremely beautiful about the Olympic ideal and its motto - 'Swifter, higher, stronger' - it's such a beautiful motto, and it celebrates everything which is the antithesis of death and dissolution and entropy. -- Chris Cleave
I was carrying two cargoes. Yes, one of them was horror, but the other one was hope. -- Chris Cleave
She supposed she must be in love. That [he] was slightly infuriating, and that she didn't mind in the slightest, might be proof of it. -- Chris Cleave
But life is not inclined to let any of us escape. -- Chris Cleave
Oh, I don't know. Italy always seemed an awfully long way to go for fascism and olives." "I rather like olives." "Mother rather liked fascism. We had to burn all the photographs when war was declared." They -- Chris Cleave
hand of a soldier on my arm but I did not turn -- Chris Cleave
The Daily Mail can't say 'asylum-seeker' without saying 'foreign criminal' in the same sentence. I'm sure it's practically editorial policy. -- Chris Cleave
The gasoline flowing through the pump made a high pitched sound, as if the screaming of my family was still dissolved in it [p.181]. -- Chris Cleave
Stupid is you can't learn, ignorant is you haven't learned yet. -- Chris Cleave
turned out that the only difference between children and adults was that children were prepared to put twice the energy into the project of not being sad. -- Chris Cleave
What is the good of influence if one can only use it on strangers? -- Chris Cleave
I understand that your brain is large and perpetually at war with itself -- Chris Cleave
You are blind to the present and we are blind to the future -- Chris Cleave
There was no ritual when one fell apart, society preferring to wait until one was lost entirely. -- Chris Cleave
Such was the past, after all: it left the present cluttered with objects the survivors were immune to. -- Chris Cleave
A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means I've survived. -- Chris Cleave
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 Cleave
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. -- Chris Cleave
I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn't the most athletic guy at school. -- Chris Cleave
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 -- Chris Cleave
If I can't write it would be as if I died. -- Chris Cleave
I smiled back at Charlie and I knew that the hopes of this whole human world could fit inside one soul. This is a good trick. This is called, globalization. -- Chris Cleave
Our stories are the tellers of us. -Little Bee -- Chris Cleave
There's what people say, and there's what people mean, and I like to explore the difference between the two. -- Chris Cleave
The young see the world that they wish for. The old see the world as it is. You -- Chris Cleave
She was whispering into it in some language that sounded like butterflies drowning in honey. -- Chris Cleave
One does not rise above the everyday simply because one ought to. -- Chris Cleave
Andrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began. -- Chris Cleave
How I would love to be a British pound. A pound is free to travel to safety and we are free to watch it go. This is the triumph. This is called globalisation. 2 -- Chris Cleave
Maybe he was overreacting ... Somehow you were meant to take responsibility, minute to minute, for deciding which events you would call manageable, now that none of them were. -- Chris Cleave
But what good is it to teach a child to count, if you don't show him that he counts for something? -- Chris Cleave
I do not know why the mind chooses these small things to break itself on. -- Chris Cleave
How to explain ... that the warning signs were so slight? That disaster, when it is quite sure of its own strength, will announce itself by hardly moving its lips? -- Chris Cleave
One could only trudge away from the place to which one had hurried in such hope at the start. One could only begin again, a year older, and resolve to carry oneself in such a way that the pressure wave of the tragedy was contained within one's own body, and could not spread one inch further. -- Chris Cleave
Don't you think we shall all be kinder to one another? I hope one's class will matter less and one's convictions more. I hope we might be more inclined to pardon one another for our errors with both. -- Chris Cleave
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. -- Chris Cleave
Our stories are the tellers of us. -- Chris Cleave
But the film in your memory, your cannot walk out so easily.Wherever you go it is always playing -- Chris Cleave
A pound coin can go wherever it thinks it will be safest ... It can disguise itself as power or property and there is nothing more serious than you are a girl who has neither. 12 -- Chris Cleave
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. -- Chris Cleave
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. -- Chris Cleave
I hope this letter reaches you (Osama) anyway. I hope it finds you before the Americans do otherwise I'm going to wish I hadn't bothered aren't I? -- Chris Cleave
However long the moon disappears, someday it must shine again. -- Chris Cleave
And thus love makes fools of us all. -- Chris Cleave
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. -- Chris Cleave
Women fall differently, that's all. We die by the stopping of our hearts, they by the insistence of theirs. -- Chris Cleave
Women share everything. It's the blessing we received when we turned down muscles and mustaches." He -- Chris Cleave
I'm telling you, trouble is like the ocean. It covers two thirds of the world. -- Chris Cleave
With love, one could glow. One did not need the intense flame after all. Now -- Chris Cleave
It was hard not to be full of hope -- Chris Cleave
To survive, you must look good or talk even better. -- Chris Cleave
The first problem of war was that no one was any good at it yet. -- Chris Cleave
Your culture has become sophisticated, like a computer, or a drug that you take for a headache. You can use it, but you cannot explain how it works. Certainly not to girls who stack up their firewood against the side of the house. -- Chris Cleave