Quotes from Chris Cleave

I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.

I was carrying two cargoes. Yes, one of them was horror, but the other one was hope.

If I could not smile, I think my situation would be even more serious.

I know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.

This is the forked tongue of grief again. It whispers in one ear: return to what you once loved best, and in the other ear it whispers, move on.

That is the trouble with happiness-all of it is built on top of something that men want.

At some point you just have to turn around and face your life head on.

I planned how I would kill myself in the time of Churchill (stand under bombs), Victoria (throw myself under a horse), and Henry the Eighth (marry Henry the Eighth)- Little Bee

But what good is it to teach a child to count, if you don't show him that he counts for something?

Life is savagely unfair. It ignores our deep-seated convictions and places a disproportionate emphasis on the decisions we make in split seconds.

On our honeymoon we talked and talked. We stayed in a beachfront villa, and we drank rum and lemonade and talked so much that I never even noticed what color the sea was. Whenever I need to stop and remind myself how much I once loved Andrew, I only need to think about this. That the ocean covers seven tenths of the earth's surface, and yet my husband could make me not notice it.

In the end I suppose we lay flowers on a grave because we cannot lay ourselves on it.

They say that in the hour before an earthquake the clouds hang leaden in the sky, the winds slows to a hot breath, and the birds fall quiet in the trees of the town square. Yes but these are the same portents that precede lunchtime, frankly.

We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.

And thus love makes fools of us all.

That is how we lived, happily and without hope. I was very young then, and I did not miss having a future because I did not know I was entitled to one.

This was how a kind heart broke, after all: inward, making no shrapnel. Dear

People wonder how they are ever going to change their lives, but really it is frighteningly easy.

Psychiatry in this place is like serving an in-flight meal in the middle of a plane crash. If I wanted to make you well, as a doctor, I should be giving you a parachute, not a cheese-and-pickle sandwich.

To be in love was to understand how alone one had been before. It was to know that if one were ever alone again, there would be no exemption from the agony of it. It wasn't the happiest feeling.

I do not know why the mind chooses these small things to break itself on.

Even for a girl like me, then, there comes a day when she can stop surviving and start living. To survive, you have to look good or talk good. But to end your story well-- here is the truth-- you have to talk yourself out of it.

I understand that your brain is large and perpetually at war with itself

It was an air one might still breathe, if everyone forgiven was brave.