Quotes from Chris Cleave

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.

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.

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.

Tom wouldn't want us to be sad. I took crocuses to his grave this morning. I arranged them as best I could, and then I came home.....One does not rise above the everyday simply because one ought to. In the end I suppose we lay flowers on a grave because we cannot lay ourselves on it.

Life took longer to reassemble than it did to blow apart,

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.

Ä°f you cannot read the beautiful things that have happened in someone's life, why should you care about their sadness? That is why people do not like us refugees. It is because they only know the tragic parts of our life, so they think we are tragic people.

You live in a world of machines and you dream of things with beating hearts. We dream of machines, because we see where beating hearts have left us.

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

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. 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.

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.

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.

To be in love was to understand how alone one had been before.

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.

I am telling you, trouble is like the ocean. It covers two thirds of the world.

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 human triumph. This is called, globalisation. A girl like me gets stopped at immigration, but a pound can leap the turnstiles, and dodge the tackles of those big men with their uniform caps, and jump straight into a waiting airport taxi. Where to, sir? Western Civilisation, my good man, and make it snappy.

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.

That's why I'm giving you Gaius Julius Caesar. Every time you look at him, I want you to imagine him saying: 'Tom, for god's sake cheer up!' " Alistair whipped the cat around when he said this, so that it addressed Tom directly.

Sometimes I feel as lonely as the Queen of England.

disaster, when it is quite sure of its own strength, will announce itself by hardly moving its lips...

How well it had suited me, that absolute license to march up to evildoers and demand who, what, where, when and why?

on a bike ride through the Surrey Lanes, pedalling in my cotton dress through the hot fields blushing with poppies, freewheeling down a sudden dip into a cool wooded sanctum.

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

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