Top 99 Chris Cleave Quotes of All time - Quotes.Pub

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

This is the real reason why no one tells us Africans anything. It is not because anyone wants to keep my continent in ignorance. It is because nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles. Or maybe you would like to, but you can’t. 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.

Why wander through your thoughts when you could drive through them quite recklessly, with sirens?

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.

They say the eye sees, but there’s a blind place in the mind.” “And I say it is lack of effort. You must hold him to the same standard as everyone else. Because where should it stop, this fashionable clemency, once we allow that there are things we can see and yet be blind to?” The singing voices swelled in the cellar and the bombs gave the percussion, and the great injured city went further into night. “Oh, I don’t know, darling. I don’t know where it will stop.

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

Oh, thought Tom, so it finishes as quickly as this. All the things we make exceptional are merely borrowed from the mundane and must without warning be surrendered to it.

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.

Your whole life, you had to fit it onto one sheet of paper. There was a black line around the edge of the sheet, a border, and if you wrote outside the line then your application would not be valid. They only gave you enough space to write down the very saddest things that had happened to you. That was the worst part. Because if you cannot read the beautiful things that have happened in someone’s life, why should you care about their sadness?

From my country you have taken its future, and to my country you have sent the objects from your past. We do not have the seed, we have the husk.

He thought of Tom dancing with the girl, and he was happy. Sleep came, finally, with the music swelling into the vacuum in his mind where there had been only that high, thin whining. The gramophone spun and he slept, with the letter still in his hand. He had kissed Duggan as he was dying. It had seemed the only thing to do.

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.

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.

Gloriously, I’ve also learned that people you meet in real life are very unrealistic. The marvelous problem for fiction is to capture this preposterous, implausible and blazingly eccentric life, and to put it in a cell overnight, to sober it up until it reads believably on the page. That’s what a novelist is: I’m not a creating god, I’m reality’s jailor.

I do not think I have left my country. I think it has traveled with me.

But life is not inclined to let any of us escape.

The Americans were tall men on full rations and it clearly made no sense to them that exhaustion should have the last word in the common language of English. “How come?” Mary heard them yelling to each other, over the noise of the engines. “How come they just left it broken like this?

There was extraordinary pain behind the ordinary nouns.

Women share everything. It’s the blessing we received when we turned down muscles and mustaches.” He.

You will laugh at me-silly village girl-for staring at an ice cube like this. You will laugh, but this was the first time I had seen water made solid. It was beautiful-because if this could be done, then perhaps it could be done to everything else that was always escaping and running away and vanishing into sand or mist.

Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.

It was not the same as charging down a machine-gun nest armed only with a Bowie knife, or strapping in to the tail-gunner seat of a four-engined heavy bomber. And no one else would ever know, since one did not get a medal for letting go of a woman’s hand on a gray Saturday morning in the middle of a European war. But 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. As.

You could only be sad if you let yourself join the dots, if you allowed the scatter of moments in their totality to have some kind of a downward trend that you might be dumb enough to extrapolate.

Bullets is okay. Bullets is quick.

It was a patient business, talking comets down to the speed of life.

How lovely was each breath. How peculiar that one had never noticed.

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.

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.

One time he showed me a picture of the band. It was the picture from the CD box. One of the musicians in the picture, he had a lot of hair. It was black with tight curls and it sat on the top of his head like a heavy weight and it went right down the back of his neck to his shoulders. I understand fashion in your language, but this hair did not look like fashion, I am telling you, it looked like a punishment.

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.

Truly, this is the one thing that people from your country and people from my country agree on. They say, That refugee girl is not one of us. That girl does not belong. That girl is a halfling, a child of an unnatural mating, an unfamiliar face in the moon.

But you are impossible, don’t you see? My other teachers are dazzled by you, or disheartened. And you are overconfident. You befriend the children, when it is not a friend that they need.

Before, life had been a tradition, a tendency to forgiveness, a regression to the mean. The city she loved had been one of plane trees that had grown for three centuries, of bridges improved as horse gave way to steam, of great coordinated endeavors in which every convergent component could be relied upon; of symphonies. But now any light could be snuffed without warning.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I do not know why the mind chooses these small things to break itself on.

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.

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.

I’m really interested in people’s decisions.

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.

Charlie put his head on one side to watch. The ears of his Batman hood flopped over. He said, “That is the Joker, isn’t it?” “No Charlie. That is the prime minister.” “Is he a goody or a baddy?” I thought to myself. “Half the people think he is a goody and the other half think he is a baddy.” Charlie giggled. “That’s silly,” he said. “That is democracy,” I said. “If you did not have it, you would want it.

After the war of course it will be like the start of spring, which is always so brilliantly sudden. The leaves will burst back onto the trees and close the gaps between the branches and we shall be startled – shan’t we? – s we are startled at the end of every winter. We shall think: oh, I had quite forgotten there were three livable seasons.

Here was the remainder of ten thousand educations, the bones drifted down to this depth. It was the fossil of one’s country. She ached, because the war had cut the thin cord that bound each child to its ancestors with links made from cross-stitch and calligraphy.

The young see the world that they wish for. The old see the world as it is. You.

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.

Perhaps life just turned a person who tried harder into a person who felt they must write it on someone else’s report.

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.

Women fall differently, that’s all. We die by the stopping of our hearts, they by the insistence of theirs.

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