Cleave Quotes & Sayings

Life is extremely short and you cannot dance to current affairs. — 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

I think my ideal man would speak many languages. He would speak Ibo and Yoruba and English and French and all of the others. He could speak with any person, even the soldiers, and if there was violence in their heart he could change it. He would not have to fight, do you see? Maybe he would not be very handsome, but he would be beautiful when he spoke. He would be very kind, even if you burned his food because you were laughing and talking with your girlfriends instead of watching the cooking. He would just say, 'Ah, never mind'. — 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

Before you bombed my boy Osama I always thought an explosion was such a quick thing but now I know better. The flash is over very fast but the fire catches hold inside you and the noise never stops ... I live in an inferno where you could shiver with cold Osama. This life is a deafening roar but listen. You could hear a pin drop. — 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

But I've learned now that your hard work and dedication will pay off, if you dare to be different. Because why would I want to be anything other than myself? — Kristyn Van 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

Near the Mexican border, rocky canyons cleave the mountains, laying them aside like broken wedges of gray cheese furred with a dark mold of pinon and juniper that sheds hard shadows on moon glazed stone, etched lithographs in gray and black, taupe and silver. Beneath feathery chamisa a rattlesnake flicks his tongue, following a scent. Along a precarious rock ledge a ring-tailed cat strolls, nose snuffling the cracks. At the base of the stone a peccary trots along familiar foot trails, toward the toes of a higher cliff where a seeping spring gathers in a rocky goblet. In the desert, sounds are dry and rattling: pebbles toed into cracks, hoofs tac-tacking on stone, the serpent rattle warning the wild pig to veer away, which she does with a grunt to the tribe behind her. From the rocky scarp the ring-tailed cat hears the whole population of the desert pass about its business in the canyon below. — Sheri S. Tepper

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

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

They spoke of small things at first, since it was best, when reattaching threads, to begin with the easiest knots. — 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

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

If, for my sins, or by my good fortune, I come across some giant hereabouts, a common occurrence with knights-errant, and overthrow him in one onslaught, or cleave him asunder to the waist, or, in short, vanquish and subdue him, will it not be well to have some one I may send him to as a present, that he may come in and fall on his knees before my sweet lady, and in a humble, submissive voice say, 'I am the giant Caraculiambro, lord of the island of Malindrania, vanquished in single combat by the never sufficiently extolled knight Don Quixote of La Mancha, who has commanded me to present myself before your Grace, that your Highness dispose of me at your pleasure'? — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

He wouldn't give up, but if i am strict and force myself now to decide upon the precise moment in this whole story when my heart irreparably broke, it was the moment when I saw the weariness and the doubt creep into my son's small muscles as his fingers slipped, for the tenth time, from the pale oak lid. — Chris Cleave

Again, I am surprised why people seek to eliminate lust and cling to love; as they wish to ignore happiness and cleave unto joy! Now, now, let's not sugar-coat things! Lust has a lot more to do with life and what is the good of life if you do not carry much lust inside of you at all times? And joy is a noble thing, but happiness though fleeting can be found every day and in every small little way! — C. JoyBell C.

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

It was beautiful, and that is a word I would not need to explain to the girls from back home, and I do not need to explain to you, because now we are all speaking the same language. The waves still smashed against the beach, furious and irresistible. But me, I watched all of those children smiling and dancing and splashing one another in salt water and bright sunlight, and I laughed and laughed and laughed until the sound of the sea was drowned. — 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

God wants us to choose to love him freely, even when that choice involves pain, because we are committed to him, not to our own good feelings and rewards. He wants us to cleave to him, as Job did, even when we have every reason to deny him hotly. That, I believe, is the central message of Job. Satan had taunted God with the accusation that humans are not truly free. Was Job being faithful simply because God had allowed him a prosperous life? Job's fiery trials proved the answer beyond doubt. Job clung to God's justice when he was the best example in history of God's apparent injustice. He did not seek the Giver because of his gifts; when all gifts were removed he still sought the Giver. — Philip Yancey

By the power of Grayskull ... I have the power!" Nick
"By the power of Grayskull, I'm going to cleave your skull from your shoulders if you don't take this seriously." Caleb — Sherrilyn Kenyon

There is a frontier-line in human closeness
That love and passion cannot violate
Though in silence mouth to mouth be soldered
And passionate devotion cleave the heart.
Here friendship, too, is powerless, and years
Of that sublime and fiery happiness
When the free soul has broken clear
From the slow languor of voluptuousness.
Those striving towards it are demented, and
If the line seem close enough to broach
Stricken with sadness ... Now you understand
Why my heart does not beat beneath your touch. — Anna Akhmatova

Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles. — Chris Cleave

And then, just as I begin to raise my sword to cleave a path to Arthur's side, there comes a sound like a tempest wind - the blast of a mighty sea gale. Men fall back, suddenly afraid. They cover their heads with their arms and peer into the darkness above. What is it? Is the roof falling? The sky?
The strange sound subsides and they glance at one another in fear and awe. Merlin is there. The Emrys is standing calmly beside Arthur. His hands are empty and upraised, his face stern in the unnatural silence he has created ... — Stephen R. Lawhead

We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves. — Chris Cleave

I've always been a big fantasy nerd. — Kristyn Van Cleave

I was carrying two cargoes. Yes, one of them was horror, but the other one was hope. — Chris Cleave

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

A scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think ... We must see all scars as beauty ... Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.
In a few breaths' time I will speak some sad words to you ... You must hear them the way we have agreed to see scars now. Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive. — Chris Cleave

We cleave to the past too much in Germany. All of our German art is too bogged down in the conventional ... I think more highly of a free person who consciously puts convention aside. — Paula Modersohn-Becker

We have our agreement about scars, I know, but this time I looked away because sometime you can see too much beauty. — 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

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

If your face is swollen from the severe beatings of life, smile and pretend to be a fat man. — Chris Cleave

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

To Him let us but cleave in all ouv strife; and the Tempte1 will flee; the wilderness will be desolate no more; angels will come and minister unto us; and when we pass from them to the ministry of life, be it to the glory of a transfiguration, the sorrows of a Gethsemane, or the sacrifice of the cross, the tran- quilizing peace of God will never be far from us. — James Martineau

At some point you just have to turn around and face your life head on. — Chris Cleave

I regret that [my grandfather] never saw the book. i had finished the third draft of what turned out to be five, but I had decided to wait until the novel was perfect before I gave it to him to read. What a fool I am. If you will forgive the one piece of advice a writer is qualified to give: never be afraid of showing someone you love a working draft of yourself. — Chris Cleave

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

Andrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began. — Chris Cleave

Yet powerful as they were, as powerful as music that brings heart-piercing pain, tears, laughter, with its enchantments, they were as music, subordinate to their own creator. Humans need not, Paks saw, worship their immortality, their cool wisdom, their knowledge of the taig, their ability to repattern mortal perceptions. In brief mortal lives humans met challenges no elf could meet, learned strategies no elf could master, chose evil or good more direct and dangerous than elf could perceive. Humans were shaped for conflict, as elves for harmony; each needed the other's balance of wisdom, but must cleave to its own nature. It was easy for an immortal to counsel patience, withdrawal until a danger passed . . . — Elizabeth Moon

I understand that your brain is large and perpetually at war with itself — Chris Cleave

Kant was surely right that our minds "cleave the air" with concepts of substance, space, time, and causality. They are the substrate of our conscious experience. They are the semantic contents of the major elements of syntax: non, preposition, tense, verb. They give us the vocabulary, verbal and mental, with which we reason about the physical and social world. Because they are gadgets in the brain rather than readouts of reality, they present us with paradoxes when we push them to the frontiers of science, philosophy, and law. And as we shall see in the next chapter, they are a source of the metaphors by which we comprehend many other spheres of life. — Steven Pinker

Some Christians seem to be accepted in their own experience, at least, that is their apprehension. When their spirit is lively, and their hopes bright, they think God accepts them, for they feel so high, so heavenly-minded, so drawn above the earth! But when their souls cleave to the dust, they are the victims of the fear that they are no longer accepted. If they could but see that all their high joys do not exalt them, and all their low despondencies do not really depress them in their Father's sight, but that they stand accepted in One who never alters, in One who is always the one God loves, always perfect, always without spot or wrinkle, or any such thing, how much happier they would be, and how much more they would honor the Savior! — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

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

What is an adventure? That depends on where you are starting from. Little girls in your country, they hide in the gap between the washing machine and the refrigerator and they make believe they are in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around them. Me and my sister, we used to hide in a gap in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around us, and make believe that we had a washing machine and a refrigerator. You live in a world of machines and you dream off things with beating hearts. We dream of machines, because we see where beating hearts have left us. — 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

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

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

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

To cleave wood is a common every-day business, and yet it has its dangers; so then, reader, there are dangers connected with your calling and daily life which it will be well for you to be aware of. Your occupation may be as humble as log splitting, and yet the devil can tempt you in it. Nowhere is he safe who thinks himself so. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Cleave to no faith when faith brings blood. — Arthur Miller

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. — 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

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

It is odd to watch with what feverish ardour Americans pursue prosperity, ever tormented by the shadowy suspicion that they might not have chosen the shortest route to get it. They cleave to the things of this world as if assured they will never die, and yet rush to snatch any that comes within their reach, as if they expected to stop living before relishing them. Death steps in, in the end, and stops them, before they have grown tired of this futile pursuit of that complete felicity which always escapes them. — Alexis De Tocqueville

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

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

There are countries of the world, and regions of one's own mind, where it is unwise to travel. — Chris Cleave

Doubt is a precipice on the way to God. Blessed is he who is freed from its bonds. He who fares without any doubt, adhere to his footprints if you do not know the way. Cleave to the footprints of the deer and advance with care that you may reach the musk-gland. By means of such trekking, even if you walk on fire, you will reach the luminous peak. — Rumi

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

I don't know nothing about birthing puppies, Miss Scarlett, but I can cleave the head off a Daimon without breaking a sweat. (Valerius) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

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

I thought there'd be some black people." "Hitler will only fight them in separate units. He's a snob. — Chris Cleave

Pride is the beginning of sin. And what is pride but the craving for undue exaltation? And this is undue exaltation - when the soul abandons Him to whom it ought to cleave as its end, and becomes a kind of end to itself. — Augustine Of Hippo

I beg you to stop your arguing and listen. The prophets speak of this time, when the Chosen One of God will cleave us apart, separating the believers from those who will be cast into the outer darkness. Have you ever in all your days seen a time when the division has been clearer? Have you ever known a time when miracles rained down from an empty sky, when the prophets' words were so clearly being fulfilled? — Janette Oke

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

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

Thoughtful men, with hearts craving the truth, have come to seek in the Catholic Church the road which leads with surety to eternal life. They have understood that they could not cleave to Jesus Christ as the Head of the Church if they did not belong to the Body of Jesus Christ which is the Church. Nor could they ever hope to possess in all its purity the faith of Jesus Christ if they were to reject its legitimate teaching authority entrusted to Peter and his successors. — Pope Leo XIII

The singer was lifted up and illuminated with gratitude, not for any one thing, but for the whole of his life, even for the agony. Even in Latin you could tell he was thanking God for the agony in particular, for the way it allowed him to cleave so tightly to the world. — Miranda July

She was whispering into it in some language that sounded like butterflies drowning in honey. — Chris Cleave

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

This helpful war. It makes us better people and then it tries to kill us. — 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

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

Let us cleave ... to those who cultivate peace with godliness, and not to those who hypocritically profess to desire it. For the Scripture says in a certain place (Mk. 7:6), 'This people honors Me with their lips, but their hearts is far from Me.' — Pope Clement I

Let them say whatever gives them comfort. — Chris Cleave

However long the moon disappears, someday it must shine again. — 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

[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

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

Neither money pays, nor name pays, nor fame, nor learning; it is CHARACTER that cleave through adamantine walls of difference. — Swami Vivekananda

Without light, how can you keep the sight of the eyes? Without a future, how can you preserve the government? [ ... ] We could have a most dilligent Home Secretary of Lunchtime. We could have an excellent Prime Minister of the Quietest Part of the Late Afternoon. But when twilight comes -do you see?- our world disappears. It cannot see beyond the day because you have taken tomorrow. And because you have tomorrow in front of your eyes, you cannot see what is being done today. — Chris Cleave

The conversation progressed, bumper-car style, to a very heated discussion about death and the survival of the soul. It amazes me that we, as a species, can argue so fervently over something that is, when all is said and done, unknowable and unprovable. Nonetheless, we all arrive at conclusions and cleave to our certainties: that there is nothing but the Void; or that we will find ourselves writing an admissions exam at the Pearly Gates. — Bill Richardson

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

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 have taken much pains to know everything that is esteemed worth knowing amongst men; but with all my reading, nothing now remains to comfort me at the close of this life but this passage of St. Paul: "It is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners." To this I cleave, and herein do I find rest. — John Selden

The greatest penalty of evil-doing is to grow into the likeness of bad men, and, growing like them, to fly from the conversation of the good, and be cut off from them, and cleave to and follow after the company of the bad. — Plato

Will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints. If you are noble, I will love you; if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical attentions. If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own. I do this not selfishly, but humbly and truly. It is alike your interest, and mine, and all men's, however long we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

And thus love makes fools of us all. — Chris Cleave

As we have considered the critical need to strengthen families and homes, we have felt that the Lord would have us encourage His beloved daughters to cheerfully cleave to their covenants. When covenants are kept, families are strengthened. — Linda K. Burton

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

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

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

The Knight in the triumph of his heart made several 6 reflections on thegreatness of the British Nation; as, that one Englishman could beat three Frenchmen; that we could never be in danger of Popery so long as we took care of our fleet; that theThames was thenoblest river in Europe; that London Bridge was a greater piece of work than any of the Seven Wonders of the World; with many other honest prejudices which naturally cleave to the heart of a true Englishman. — Joseph Addison

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