Quotes from Chris Cleave

Let them say whatever gives them comfort.

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

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

There was less of him now. There was less of them all. Officers and men dragged themselves around in uniforms three sizes too big, new holes punched into every belt, every collar hanging loose. They were a garrison of skinny boys performing a play about soldiers.

Look, do you believe in the institution of marriage?" "Of course." "And you accept that such beautiful lightning cannot strike you twice?" "Well yes, I suppose—" "Then shouldn't you get a ring on her as soon as possible?

With this girl – girl three in the queue – her story had made her so sad that she did not know the name of the place where she was at and she did not want to know. The girl was not even curious.

It is good to live like this. Once you are ready to die, you do not suffer so badly from the horror.

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.

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.

We looked as if we'd been cobbled together in Photoshop, the three of us, walking to my husband's funeral. One white middle-class mother, one skinny black refugee girl, and one small Dark Knight from Gotham City.

She knew, now, why her father had not spoken of the last war, nor Alistair of his. It was hardly fair on the living.

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.

To survive, you must look good or talk even better

They found my husband with his feet treading empty air, touching the soil of no country. 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.

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

waiting for our lives to converge onto the precise fault line at which our past could be cleaved from our future with three soft strikes of the bright brass knocker.

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.

How could he even attempt it, after eight days and nights of bombing? And yet this is when he must write: now, in the lull between attacks...War made one do everything when one wasn't at all ready. Dying, yes, but also living.

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.

For me and the girls from my village, horror is a disease and we are sick with it. It is not an illness you can cure yourself of by standing up and letting the big red cinema seat fold itself up behind you.

because this is how it was with them: the boy's father had dark skin, darker even than my own, and the boy's mother was a white woman. They were holding hands and smiling at their boy, whose skin was light brown. It was the color of the man and the woman joined in happiness. It

Bullets is okay. Bullets is quick.

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.

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.