Chris Cleave famous quotes

On the girl's brown legs there were many small white scars. I was thinking, Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and the moons on your dress? I thought 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 the dying. A scar means, I survived.
-- Chris Cleave

#Girl #Stars #Mean

A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.
-- Chris Cleave

#Mean #Dying #Doe

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

#Faces #Turns

Life is extremely short and you cannot dance to current affairs.
-- Chris Cleave

#Life Is #Affair #Current Affairs

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

#Two #Horror

We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.
-- Chris Cleave

#Stories

Our stories are the tellers of us.
-- Chris Cleave

#Stories

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'.
-- Chris Cleave

#Mean #Secret #Dying

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

#Children #Sunshine #Clouds

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

#Talking #Stories #Wanted

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

#Men #Want #Trouble

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

#Thinking #Would Be #Serious

You may think that's funny Osama but you never can squeeze every last bit of pride out of a human being. It's like a tube of toothpaste. You can twist it and you can crush it but there's always a tiny bit left isn't there?
-- Chris Cleave

#Crush #Pride #Thinking

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

#Horse #Bombs #Littles

I’m telling you, trouble is like the ocean. It covers two thirds of the world.
-- Chris Cleave

#Ocean #Two #World

It was hard not to be full of hope
-- 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

#Doctors #Giving #Sandwiches

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

#Soul #World #Fit

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

#Andrew

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

#Clouds #Weather #Trying

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

#Men #Faces #Your Face

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

#Grief #Heart #Mind

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

#Running #Names #Capes

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

#Girl #Country #Dream

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

#Fall #Clouds #Squares

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

#Principles #World #Down And

However long the moon disappears, someday it must shine again.
-- Chris Cleave

#Moon #Long #Shining

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

#Fool

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

#Girl #Summer #Clouds

I'm a much better writer for being a father.
-- Chris Cleave

#Father #Being A Father

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

#School #Thinking #Guy

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

#Athlete #Character #Decision

I'm not happy with just repeating myself.
-- Chris Cleave

#Not Happy

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

#Hate #Anger #Writing

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

#Mean #Thinking #People

Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive
-- Chris Cleave

#Mean #Stories #Alive

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

#Writing #Character #Novelists

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

#Athlete #Years #Different

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

#Bad Day #Giving #Lazy

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

#Beautiful #Thinking #Stronger

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

#Athlete #Thinking #Two

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

#Mean #Two #Differences

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

#Criminals #Asylum Seekers #Asylums

My whole life is my work.
-- Chris Cleave

#Life Is #Whole Life

If I can't write it would be as if I died.
-- Chris Cleave

#Writing #Would Be

I'm really interested in people's decisions.
-- Chris Cleave

#People #Decision

Studying psychology is fun because you're always looking for the same things I think a writer should be looking for, which is the story behind the story.
-- Chris Cleave

#Fun #Thinking #Psychology

This thing with being lovers, it isn't like being married.
-- Chris Cleave

#Lovers #Married #Being Married

Looking after a very sick child was the Olympics of parenting.
-- Chris Cleave

#Children #Sick #Olympics

A scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.
-- Chris Cleave

#Mean #Thinking #Dying

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

#Dream #Oil #Rude

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

#Girl #House #Drug

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

#Way #Scar #Speak

Horror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it.
-- Chris Cleave

#Country #Suffering #Horror

Wouldn't that be funny, if the oil rebels were playing U2 in their jungle camps, and the government soldiers were playing U2 in their trucks. I think everyone was killing everyone else and listening to the same music... That is a good trick about this world, Sarah. No one likes each other, but everyone likes U2.
-- Chris Cleave

#Thinking #Government #Oil

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

#Summer #Reality #Refugee

On our honeymoon we talked and talked. We stayed in a beachfront villa, and we drank rum and lemonade and talked so much that I never even noticed what color the sea was. Whenever I need to stop and remind myself how much I once loved Andrew, I only need to think about this. That the ocean covers seven tenths of the earth's surface, and yet my husband could make me not notice it.
-- Chris Cleave

#Husband #Ocean #Thinking

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

#Mean #Stories #Alive

To be well in your mind you have first to be free.
-- Chris Cleave

#Mind #Firsts #Wells

I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.
-- Chris Cleave

#Wreckage

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

#Decision #Splits #Life Is

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

#Beautiful #Girlfriend #Heart

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

#People #Wonder #Easy

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

#Girl #Looks #Stories

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

#Cry #Pity #Understood

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

#Ears #Whispering #World

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

#Grief #Moving #Ears

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

#Missing #Young #Without Hope

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

#Little Bee #Refugee #Refuge