Quotes from Chris Cleave

The eye may be an obligate scout but the heart is not an incurable folllower.

You will laugh at me-silly village girl-for staring at an ice cube like this. You will laugh, but this was the first time I had seen water made solid. It was beautiful-because if this could be done, then perhaps it could be done to everything else that was always escaping and running away and vanishing into sand or mist.

I do not think I can just pretend it is okay." "Well if you can't pretend in London, where can you pretend?" He sniffed, and put on a pair of sunglasses, and waved his hand at the street. "I mean look," he said. "There's eight million people here pretending the others aren't getting on their nerves. I believe it's called civilization.

It was how mothers carried on, after all, with a glint in the eye that implied a sure clairvoyance and also that it was your turn to talk. This was the velvet rope mothers offered: enough silence to make a noose with. Mary

I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar maker wants 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 doesnot form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.

You know what worries me about the enemy? It's the violence. It is almost as if he thinks he can solve every problem this way.

Do you know what peace is, Charlie?... Peace is a time when people can tell each other their real names.

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.

We must take turns, don't you think? Every time one of us is buried like this, we shall dig the other out.

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.

Death, finally, was British; life chaotic and foreign. The

We are a nation of glorious cowards, ready to battle any evil but our own." Her

Your whole life, you had to fit it onto one sheet of paper. There was a black line around the edge of the sheet, a border, and if you wrote outside the line then your application would not be valid. They only gave you enough space to write down the very saddest things that had happened to you. That was the worst part. Because if you cannot read the beautiful things that have happened in someone's life, why should you care about their sadness?

Life took longer to reassemble that it did to blow apart, but that didn't meant wouldn't be lovely, providing that one remembered to go for country walks, and to tune the wireless to music.

The balloons' snub noses swung left and right in the fickle breeze, giving them the anxious air of compasses abandoned by north.

You could have lost your gloves in the fog and found them half an hour later, still suspended in the air at wrist height.

We are a nation of glorious cowards, ready to battle any evil but our own.

It was queer the way things crept: the night, and these feelings. One was brought up to scorn the tendency to despair. But it seemed that the darkness knew this, and found a way to reach one nevertheless. It was patient and subtle, gauging the heart's output of light. Her confusion grew, the heart lucent and the mind lucifugous

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].

You are not bad people. You are blind to the present and we are blind to the future.

Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.

This is the real reason why no one tells us Africans anything. It is not because anyone wants to keep my continent in ignorance. It is because nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles. Or maybe you would like to, but you can't. 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.

The dreams of my country are no different from yours -- they are as big as the human heart.

I sat in the ground, with the warm sun shining on my back, and I realized that the earth had not rejected me and the sunlight had not snapped me in two.