Quotes from Chris Cleave

A scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.

If your face is swollen from the severe beatings of life, smile and pretend to be a fat man.

Still shaking, in the pew, I understood that it isn't the dead we cry for. We cry for ourselves, and I didn't deserve my own pity.

There's eight million people here pretending the others aren't getting on their nerves. I believe it's called civilization.

Her life was one endless loop that she raced around, with steep banked curves so she could never change or slow down. It just delivered her back to herself, over and over and over.

Stupid is you can't learn, ignorant is you haven't learned yet.

The worst thing would be to decide that it was love, and then to discover - after one was taken - that it hadn't been. No: the worst thing would be to decide that it wasn't love, and then to discover years later - old and unconsoled - that it had been. No: the worst thing - the worst, worst thing - was this having to decide.

Before you bombed my boy Osama I always thought an explosion was such a quick thing but now I know better. The flash is over very fast but the fire catches hold inside you and the noise never stops…I live in an inferno where you could shiver with cold Osama. This life is a deafening roar but listen. You could hear a pin drop.

So when I say that I am a refugee, you must understand that there is no refuge.

Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.

There are countries of the world, and regions of one's own mind, where it is unwise to travel.

All the things we make exceptional are merely borrowed from the mundane and must without warning be surrendered to it.

It was hard not to be full of hope

In my world death will come chasing. In your world it will start whispering in your ear to destroy yourself. I know this because it started whispering to me when I was in the detention center.

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

Everything can be restored. If one won't believe that, how does one endure all this?

London had always had this trick of living in two time signatures at once - the urgent and the always - each in earshot of the other.

Looking after a very sick child was the Olympics of parenting.

turned out that the only difference between children and adults was that children were prepared to put twice the energy into the project of not being sad.

In a few breaths' time I will speak some sad words to you. But you must hear them the same way we have agreed to see scars now. Sad words are just another beauty.....

I'm going to write to you about the emptiness that was left when you took my boy away. I'm going to write so you can look into my empty life and see what a human boy really is from the shape of the hole he leaves behind. I want you to feel that hole in your heart and stroke it with your hands and cut your fingers on its sharp edges.

Women fall differently, that's all. We die by the stopping of our hearts, they by the insistence of theirs.

One didn't understand, until one had seen a great many bodies, the unconscious effort that one must be making every minute simply to keep one's hands and face and clothes clean. The world's surfaces were so filthy that the living touched them only with the tips of their fingers and the soles of their shoes. How grubby it was to die, to give up making that effort.

She was whispering into it in some language that sounded like butterflies drowning in honey.