Quotes from Chris Cleave

I was brought up to believe that everyone brave is forgiven, but in wartime courage is cheap and clemency out of season.

If you cannot read the beautiful things that have happened in someone's life, why should you care about their sadness?

Horror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it. For me and the girls from my village, horror is a disease and we are sick with it.

Perhaps this was what love was like after all- not the lurch of going over a humpback bridge, and not the incandescence of fireworks, just the quiet understanding that one should take a kind hand when it was offered, before all light was gone from the sky.

One does not rise above the everyday simply because one ought to.

Tea is the tast of my land:it is bitter and warm,strong,and sharp with memory.It tastes of longing.It tastes of the distance between where you are and where you come from.Also it vanishes-the taste of it vanishes from your tongue while your lips are still hot from the cup.It disappears,like plantations stretching up into the mist.I have heard that your country drinks more tea than any other.How sad that must make you-like children who long for absent mothers.I am sorry.

The true moments of one's life were sadder for the fact that they must always be synchronized with the ordinary: with rail timetables, with breaks in traffic.

Lawrence frowned. "I don't get you," he said. "If you understood how serious your situation is, I don't think you'd smile." I shrugged. "If I could not smile, I think my situation would be even more serious.

Even for a girl like me, then, there comes a day when she can stop surviving and start living.

A scar means, I survived.

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 (...) we must see all scars as beauty. (...) Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, 'I survived'.

A pound coin can go wherever it thinks it will be safest. ... It can disguise itself as power or property and there is nothing more serious than you are a girl who has neither. 12

He really had experienced every tiniest increment of time in the four decades since then, and yet here he was surprised to be suddenly old and crippled. Turned out the rope didn't care if you noticed every daisy on the path to the gallows.

You're not asking for input. You are asking your admirer's to prove they are paying attention.

A girl like me gets stopped at immigration.

The only reason we were married in such haste was that my mother begged me not to marry Andrew at all. One of you in a marriage has to be soft , she said. One of you has to know how to say, Have it your way . That's not going to be you, dear, so it might as well be the man.

Don't you think we shall all be kinder to one another? I hope one's class will matter less and one's convictions more. I hope we might be more inclined to pardon one another for our errors with both.

There was something about the star, rising above the stable, that still pulled a crowd in from the fields.

Sometimes -- in the rare moments when she wasn't causing quite serious mental discomfort -- being friends with Zoe was like being knocked dizzy by grace.

to have faith—that a lover would be constant and life clement—this did require courage in a city more disposed to beginnings than safe continuations.

LIFE is a big word, isn't it? Let's break it down into small segments. Let's find a level of granularity we can plan around; we could say we'll take it a month at a time, or a week at a time, and treat each of those modules almost as training units.

I regret that [my grandfather] never saw the book. i had finished the third draft of what turned out to be five, but I had decided to wait until the novel was perfect before I gave it to him to read. What a fool I am. If you will forgive the one piece of advice a writer is qualified to give: never be afraid of showing someone you love a working draft of yourself.

The church was stuffed with mourners, of course. No one from work - I tried to keep my life and my magazine separate - but otherwise everybody Andrew and I knew was there. It was disorientating, like having the entire contents of one's address book dressed in black and exported into pews in non alphabetical order.

Me and Nkiruka, we watched through the window until the moon grew an extraordinary size, so big that it filled the window frame. We could see the face of the man in the moon, so close that we could see the madness in his eyes.