Top 100 Chris Cleave Quotes
#1. What is the good of influence if one can only use it on strangers?
Chris Cleave
#2. 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
#3. I understand that your brain is large and perpetually at war with itself
Chris Cleave
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. I'm a much better writer for being a father.
Chris Cleave
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. You are blind to the present and we are blind to the future
Chris Cleave
#12. 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
#13. There was no ritual when one fell apart, society preferring to wait until one was lost entirely.
Chris Cleave
#14. I am a woman built on the wreckage of herself, Narrator
Chris Cleave
#15. Such was the past, after all: it left the present cluttered with objects the survivors were immune to.
Chris Cleave
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means I've survived.
Chris Cleave
#19. 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
#20. If I could not smile, I think my situation would be even more serious.
Chris Cleave
#21. But life is not inclined to let any of us escape.
Chris Cleave
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. If your face is swollen from the severe beatings of life, smile and pretend to be a fat man.
Chris Cleave
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. I'm really interested in people's decisions.
Chris Cleave
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. Horror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it.
Chris Cleave
#33. I know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.
Chris Cleave
#34. 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
#35. You are a mousetrap of a friend, all soft cheese and hard springs
Chris Cleave
#36. Yu can't live if yu dead, neither. Yu probly too smart to get dat.
Chris Cleave
#37. A girl like me gets stopped at immigration.
Chris Cleave
#38. At one point he had covered more than seven tenths of the earth's surface.
Chris Cleave
#39. 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
#40. I thought there'd be some black people." "Hitler will only fight them in separate units. He's a snob.
Chris Cleave
#41. 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
#42. This helpful war. It makes us better people and then it tries to kill us.
Chris Cleave
#43. I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn't the most athletic guy at school.
Chris Cleave
#44. This was how a kind heart broke, after all: inward, making no shrapnel. Dear
Chris Cleave
#45. It is good to live like this. Once you are ready to die, you do not suffer so badly from the horror.
Chris Cleave
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. If I can't write it would be as if I died.
Chris Cleave
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. lips, excused from their color, had formed words relieved of their sound.
Chris Cleave
#55. That is the trouble with happiness-all of it is built on top of something that men want.
Chris Cleave
#56. Looking after a very sick child was the Olympics of parenting.
Chris Cleave
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. We have our agreement about scars, I know, but this time I looked away because sometime you can see too much beauty.
Chris Cleave
#64. This thing with being lovers, it isn't like being married.
Chris Cleave
#65. People wonder how they are ever going to change their lives, but really it is frighteningly easy.
Chris Cleave
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. I was hoping my life might make more sense from a great height.
Chris Cleave
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. Our stories are the tellers of us. -Little Bee
Chris Cleave
#72. 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
#73. 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
#75. hand of a soldier on my arm but I did not turn
Chris Cleave
#76. We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.
Chris Cleave
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. There's what people say, and there's what people mean, and I like to explore the difference between the two.
Chris Cleave
#80. The young see the world that they wish for. The old see the world as it is. You
Chris Cleave
#81. 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
#82. She was whispering into it in some language that sounded like butterflies drowning in honey.
Chris Cleave
#83. There are countries of the world, and regions of one's own mind, where it is unwise to travel.
Chris Cleave
#84. 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
#85. One does not rise above the everyday simply because one ought to.
Chris Cleave
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. Stupid is you can't learn, ignorant is you haven't learned yet.
Chris Cleave
#89. To be well in your mind you have first to be free.
Chris Cleave
#91. Andrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began.
Chris Cleave
#92. Everything can be restored. If one won't believe that, how does one endure all this?
Chris Cleave
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. Come to Me and we will blow the world back together WITH INCREDIBLE NOISE AND FURY.
Chris Cleave
#98. 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
#99. There's eight million people here pretending the others aren't getting on their nerves. I believe it's called civilization.
Chris Cleave
#100. 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
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