Quotes from Chris Cleave

I conceded on tomato ketchup and ice cream too, and there was triumph in Charlie's face and horror in his eyes. There was extraordinary pain behind the ordinary nouns.

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.

I found the little bottle of nail varnish at the bottom of a charity box. It still had the price ticket on it. If I ever discover the person who gave it then I will tell them, for the cost of one British pound and ninety-nine pence, they saved my life. Because this is what I did in that place, to remind myself I was alive underneath everything; under my steel toe caps I wore bright red nail varnish.

How imperceptible it had been, that transition in his facial expression, from deadly serious to seriously dead. Already those two faces were blurring together for me. My husband alive and my husband dead.

Mary felt a sadness as weary as his manner. Of course the poor man dismissed the painting. Such was the past, after all: it left the present cluttered with objects the survivors were immune to.

A memory can be banished, even indefinitely, deported from consciousness by the relentless everydayness of running a successful magazine, mothering a son, and burying a husband. A human being, though, is a different thing entirely.

it's the growing sense of dissatisfaction that keeps one awake at night. The brain refusing to let go of the alternative lives that might have been. It isn't the strong sleepers who sleep around.

I suppose all of us have to look at our job and ask how it now serves the cause I suppose one is lucky if a simple answer presents itself.

We were joined by what happened on the beach. Getting rid of her would be like losing a part of me. It would be like shedding a finger, or a name. I wasn't going to let that happen again.

The sweetness of the blackberries revealed itself incompletely, changing and deepening until it dissolved from the back of the tongue with the maddening hint of a greater remainder. He was left with a question he could not phrase, and a galaxy of tiny seeds that tantalized the tongue.

I don't know. We've never done anything, have we? We've no talent but conversation.

Perhaps it was true, thought Alistair, that Septembers would come again. People would love the crisp cool of the mornings, and it would not remind them of the week war was declared....Alistair let the idea grow: that when the war's heat was spent, the last remaining pilots would ditch their last bombs into the sea and land their planes on cratered airfields that would slowly give way to brambles. That pilots would take off their jackets and ties, and pick fruit.

I realized I knew nothing about men apart from the fear.

television that

As tripe is fond of onions, darling, but what a fright they look together in the pan.

did not cry when they killed my sister but I did cry when I heard the music coming out of the soldiers' truck because I was thinking, That is my sister's favorite song and she will never hear it again.

and you start wondering whether that badness you've seen in yourself is really all that bad at all..." "Maybe that's just developing as a person, Sarah" I sighed, and look out at Little Bee "Well" I said. "Maybe this is a developing world.

Nkiruka loved music, and now I saw that she was right because life is extremely short and you cannot dance to current affairs.

Yes but he is a man though, don't you see? You could knit one quicker than you can make one fit off-the-shelf.

There was no ritual when one fell apart, society preferring to wait until one was lost entirely. The

But the film in your memory, you cannot walk out of it so easily. Wherever you go it is always playing. So when I say that I am a refugee, you must understand that there is no refuge.

Any more décolletage and you'd look rather as if you might; any less and you'd look as if you might rather not." When Hilda was on form she was hard to resist—

Oh, I don't know. Italy always seemed an awfully long way to go for fascism and olives." "I rather like olives." "Mother rather liked fascism. We had to burn all the photographs when war was declared." They

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.