Chris Cleave Quotes & Sayings

Our stories are the tellers of us. — Chris Cleave

There was extraordinary pain behind the ordinary nouns. — Chris Cleave

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

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

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

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

In the end I suppose we lay flowers on a grave because we cannot lay ourselves on it. — Chris Cleave

Peace is a time when people can tell each other their real names — 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

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

Compromise, eh? Isn't it sad, growing up? You start off like Charlie. You start off thinking you can kill all the baddies and save the world. Then you get a little bit older, maybe Little Bee's age, and you realize that some of the world's badness is inside you, that maybe you're a part of it. And then you get a little bit older still, and a bit more comfortable, and you start wondering whether that badness you've seen in yourself is really all that bad at all. You start talking about ten percent. — 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

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

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

It's extremely hard for athletes to accept what's happened to them sometimes. It's hard to be beaten by a small margin, and I've spoken with athletes who, for years afterward, have been tormented by the knowledge that, had they done something ever so slightly different, they could have been one-ten-thousandth of a second quicker. — 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

There's what people say, and there's what people mean, and I like to explore the difference between the two. — Chris Cleave

If this policeman began to suspect me, he could call the immigration people. Then one of them would click a button on their computer and mark a check box on my file and I would be deported. I would be dead, but no one would have fired any bullets. I realized, this is why the police do not carry guns. In a civilized country, they kill you with a click. The killing is done far away, at the heart of the kingdom in a building full of computers and coffee cups. — 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

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

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

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

It is possible to do good things with an imperfect situation. — 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

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

The worst thing would be to decide that it was love, and then to discover - after one was taken - that it hadn't been. No: the worst thing would be to decide that it wasn't love, and then to discover years later - old and unconsoled - that it had been. No: the worst thing - the worst, worst thing - was this having to decide. — Chris Cleave

April showers bring May flowers — 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

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

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

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

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 am a woman built on the wreckage of herself, Narrator — Chris Cleave

You don't know anything,' she said. 'If you knew one thing about this life you would not think it was so funny.'
Yvette put her hands on her hips. She shook her head slowly. 'Darlin,' she said. 'Life did take its gift back from yu and me in de diffren order, dat's all. Truth to tell, funny is all me got lef wid. An yu, darlin, all yu got lef is paperwork. — Chris Cleave

Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and the moons on your dess? I though that would be pretty too, and I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty. OKay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on dying. A scar means, I survivied. — 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

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

There was no ritual when one fell apart, society preferring to wait until one was lost entirely. — Chris Cleave

Death is 'where you run to when none of the principalities of your conscience will grant you asylum.' ... 'In my world [(Africa)] death will come chasing. In your world [(the West)] it will start whispering in your ear to destroy yourself.'
'We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? ... A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means 'I survived'
'A sad story means, this storyteller is alive. The next thing you know, something fine will happen to her, something marvellous, and she will turn around and smile. — Chris Cleave

If I could not smile, I think my situation would be even more serious. — Chris Cleave

Women fall differently, that's all. We die by the stopping of our hearts, they by the insistence of theirs. — Chris Cleave

Tea is the tast of my land:it is bitter and warm,strong,and sharp with memory.It tastes of longing.It tastes of the distance between where you are and where you come from.Also it vanishes-the taste of it vanishes from your tongue while your lips are still hot from the cup.It disappears,like plantations stretching up into the mist.I have heard that your country drinks more tea than any other.How sad that must make you-like children who long for absent mothers.I am sorry. — 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

The church was stuffed with mourners, of course. No one from work - I tried to keep my life and my magazine separate - but otherwise everybody Andrew and I knew was there. It was disorientating, like having the entire contents of one's address book dressed in black and exported into pews in non alphabetical order. — Chris Cleave

All the things we make exceptional are merely borrowed from the mundane and must without warning be surrendered to it. — Chris Cleave

People wonder how they are ever going to change their lives, but really it is frighteningly easy. — Chris Cleave

Looking after a very sick child was the Olympics of parenting. — 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

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

What's he like?" "Thoughtful. Interesting. Compassionate." "These are English words for ugly. — Chris Cleave

Isn't it sad, growing up? You start off like my Charlie. You start off thinking you can kill all the baddies and save the world. Then you get a little bit older, maybe Little Bee's age, and you realize that some of the world's badness is inside you, that maybe you're a part of it. And then you get a bit older still, and a bit more comfortable, and you start wondering whether that badness you've seen in yourself is really all that bad at all. You start talking about ten per cent."
Maybe that's just developing as a person, Sarah."
I sighed and looked out at Little Bee
Well," I said, "maybe this is a developing world. — Chris Cleave

London is a city built on the wreckage of itself Osama. It's had more comebacks that The Evil Dead. It's been flattened by storms and flooded out and rotted with plague. Londoners jut took a deep breath and put the kettle on. Then the whole thing burned down. Every last stick of it. ... People thought it was the end of the world. BUt the Londoners got up the next day and the world hadn't ended so they rebuilt the city in 3 years stronger and taller. — Chris Cleave

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

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

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

A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means I've survived. — 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

With love, one could glow. One did not need the intense flame after all. Now — 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 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

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

One does not rise above the everyday simply because one ought to. — 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

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

There's eight million people here pretending the others aren't getting on their nerves. I believe it's called civilization. — Chris Cleave

I smiled down at Charlie, and I understood that he would be free now even if I would not. In this way the life that was in me would find its way in him now. It was not a sad feeling. I felt my heart take off lightly like a butterfly and I thought, yes, this is it, something has survived in me, something that does not need to run anymore, because it is worth more than all the money in the world and its currency, its true home, is the living. And not just the living in this particular country or in that particular country, but the secret, irresistible heart of the living. I smiled back at Charlie and I knew that the hopes of this whole human world could fit inside one soul. — 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

This was always my trouble when I was learning to speak your language. Every word can defend itself. Just when you go to grab it, it can split into two separate meanings so the understanding closes on empty air. I admire you people. You are like sorcerers and you have made your language as safe as your money. — 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

Stupid is you can't learn, ignorant is you haven't learned yet. — 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

I know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul. — Chris Cleave

Come to Me and we will blow the world back together WITH INCREDIBLE NOISE AND FURY. — Chris Cleave

Occurred to him that no one who hadn't been in battle could know what things were worth. — Chris Cleave

The idea that Sophie could die had always been there, ever since the first diagnosis, and yet it seemed like a bad place on a map, an Ivory Coast, somewhere not urgently frightening because fear itself kept you away from the place. You thought of it as somewhere braver people went, or at least as somewhere you'd have plenty of time to pack your bags for. — 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

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

The planet was filling up with good-looking young worldlings built entirely of opposites, canceling themselves out and- speaking as a bloke- leaving nothing you'd honestly want to go for a drink with. This new species of guys paired city shoes with backwoods beards. They played in bands but they worked in offices. They hated the rich but they bought lottery tickets, they laughed at comedies about the shittiness of lives that were based quite pointedly on their own, and worst of all they were so endlessly bloody gossipy. Every single thing they did, from unboxing a phone through to sleeping with his athlese, they had this compulsion to stick it online and see what everyone else thought. Their lives were a howling vacuum that sucked in attention. He didn't see how Zoe could ever find love with this new breed of men with cyclonic souls that sucked like Dysons and never needed their bag changed in order to keep on and on sucking. — Chris Cleave

lips, excused from their color, had formed words relieved of their sound. — Chris Cleave

You're not asking for input. You are asking your admirer's to prove they are paying attention. — 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

Our stories are the tellers of us. -Little Bee — 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

To survive, you must look good or talk even better. — Chris Cleave

Alistair smiled. 'How long this war has been.'
'I'll say. One hardly remembers how we lived before. Lightly - not worrying much.'
'Do you suppose we shall ever live that way again?'
'Oh, who knows? Given sufficient champagne and ether.'
'Maybe if we stay drunk to the end of our days we shan't remember. — Chris Cleave

Such was the past, after all: it left the present cluttered with objects the survivors were immune to. — Chris Cleave

But the film in your memory, your cannot walk out so easily.Wherever you go it is always playing — Chris Cleave

If I can't write it would be as if I died. — 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

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

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. — Chris Cleave

A scar means, I survived. — Chris Cleave

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. — Chris Cleave

But that is the way with killers, I suppose. What is the end of all innocence for you is just another Tuesday morning for them, and they walk off back to their planet of death giving no more thought to the world of the living that we would give to any other tourist destination: a place to be briefly visited and returned from with souvenirs and a haunting sensation that we could have paid less for them. — Chris Cleave

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

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