Top 100 Chris Cleave Quotes
#1. To be well in your mind you have first to be free.
Chris Cleave
#3. 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
#4. Our stories are the tellers of us. -Little Bee
Chris Cleave
#5. I was hoping my life might make more sense from a great height.
Chris Cleave
#6. 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
#7. We have our agreement about scars, I know, but this time I looked away because sometime you can see too much beauty.
Chris Cleave
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. That is the trouble with happiness-all of it is built on top of something that men want.
Chris Cleave
#13. This thing with being lovers, it isn't like being married.
Chris Cleave
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. Everything can be restored. If one won't believe that, how does one endure all this?
Chris Cleave
#20. Andrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began.
Chris Cleave
#22. We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.
Chris Cleave
#23. Stupid is you can't learn, ignorant is you haven't learned yet.
Chris Cleave
#24. 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
#25. She was whispering into it in some language that sounded like butterflies drowning in honey.
Chris Cleave
#26. 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
#27. The young see the world that they wish for. The old see the world as it is. You
Chris Cleave
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means I've survived.
Chris Cleave
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. You are blind to the present and we are blind to the future
Chris Cleave
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. I'm a much better writer for being a father.
Chris Cleave
#40. 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
#41. I am a woman built on the wreckage of herself, Narrator
Chris Cleave
#42. If I can't write it would be as if I died.
Chris Cleave
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. This was how a kind heart broke, after all: inward, making no shrapnel. Dear
Chris Cleave
#47. I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn't the most athletic guy at school.
Chris Cleave
#48. I thought there'd be some black people." "Hitler will only fight them in separate units. He's a snob.
Chris Cleave
#49. Yu can't live if yu dead, neither. Yu probly too smart to get dat.
Chris Cleave
#50. I know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.
Chris Cleave
#51. Horror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it.
Chris Cleave
#52. 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
#53. I'm really interested in people's decisions.
Chris Cleave
#54. Women fall differently, that's all. We die by the stopping of our hearts, they by the insistence of theirs.
Chris Cleave
#55. The first problem of war was that no one was any good at it yet.
Chris Cleave
#56. In the end I suppose we lay flowers on a grave because we cannot lay ourselves on it.
Chris Cleave
#58. It was an air one might still breathe, if everyone forgiven was brave.
Chris Cleave
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. With love, one could glow. One did not need the intense flame after all. Now
Chris Cleave
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. But what good is it to teach a child to count, if you don't show him that he counts for something?
Chris Cleave
#68. 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
#69. Death, finally, was British; life chaotic and foreign. The
Chris Cleave
#70. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. We are a nation of glorious cowards, ready to battle any evil but our own." Her
Chris Cleave
#75. 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
#76. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#81. 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
#82. I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.
Chris Cleave
#84. But the film in your memory, your cannot walk out so easily.Wherever you go it is always playing
Chris Cleave
#85. [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
#86. 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
#87. They spoke of small things at first, since it was best, when reattaching threads, to begin with the easiest knots.
Chris Cleave
#88. Life is extremely short and you cannot dance to current affairs.
Chris Cleave
#89. 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
#90. I'm telling you, trouble is like the ocean. It covers two thirds of the world.
Chris Cleave
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. You're not asking for input. You are asking your admirer's to prove they are paying attention.
Chris Cleave
#98. I do not know why the mind chooses these small things to break itself on.
Chris Cleave
#100. 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
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