Quotes from Chris Cleave

And that is how it was, the first time I touched the soil of England as a free woman, it was not with the soles of my boots but with the seat of my trousers.

Why wander through your thoughts when you could drive through them quite recklessly, with sirens?

Truly, this is the one thing that people from your country and people from my country agree on. They say, That refugee girl is not one of us. That girl does not belong. That girl is a halfling, a child of an unnatural mating, an unfamiliar face in the moon.

When the hour had come for the war to take him away, that had been the first and last moment she had known without doubt that she loved him. One knew how one felt only when things ended. And

Mary suppressed both a smile and a delightful suspicion that teaching might not be the worst way to spend the idle hours between breakfast and society.

I want to be a journalist again. I want to make a difference in the world.

Well, we want such different things from men. You earnestly want someone who will help you reform society." Mary smiled. "Whereas you . . . ?" ". . . just want a tall man and a stiff drink. You could even swap the adjectives." Mary

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

to her, Do yu know the name of dis place where we is at? But the third girl did not know either. She just stood there, and she was wearing a blue T-shirt and blue denim jeans and white Dunlop Green Flash trainers, and she just looked down at her own see-through bag, and her bag was full of letters and documents. There was so

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.

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.

hand of a soldier on my arm but I did not turn

If I were you," Tom said, "I should stick to reading, writing and arithmetic." "But what good is it to teach a child to count, if you don't show him that he counts for something?" Tom held up his hands. "I'm sorry, you're losing me." Mary exhaled smoke. "Possibly I am.

There was extraordinary pain behind the ordinary nouns.

Todo mundo tem uma opinião, não é mesmo? Talvez seja isso o que está errado com este país.

Lord," he said, "on this holiest of days, we thank you for food and ammunition. May our ships get through and the enemy's get lost." They all said "Amen" and then the orderlies brought in something that the cook had made out of bread crumbs and canned malevolence. Alistair

Such was the past, after all: it left the present cluttered with objects the survivors were immune to.

At one point he had covered more than seven tenths of the earth's surface.

All you've seen is trouble, so you think trouble is all you're going to get.

I learned your language and I learned your rules. I am more like you than me now.

What is the good of influence if one can only use it on strangers?

London was perfectly prepared to give him a night out of anywhere on earth, and yet all he asked was to come home.

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.

He thought of Tom dancing with the girl, and he was happy. Sleep came, finally, with the music swelling into the vacuum in his mind where there had been only that high, thin whining. The gramophone spun and he slept, with the letter still in his hand. He had kissed Duggan as he was dying. It had seemed the only thing to do.