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I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.

Chris Cleave

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Chris Cleave
Age: 51
Born: 1973
Born: May 14
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Story
Cannot
Tellers
Stories
Finished
Wanted
Choose
Writing
Started
Stop
Start
Talking

More quotes by Chris Cleave

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I like to push characters to extremes so they have to make really tough decisions and there is no life more extreme than that of an athlete.
Chris Cleave
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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.
Chris Cleave
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I think that there's something extremely beautiful about the Olympic ideal and its motto - 'Swifter, higher, stronger' - it's such a beautiful motto, and it celebrates everything which is the antithesis of death and dissolution and entropy.
Chris Cleave
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Wouldn't that be funny, if the oil rebels were playing U2 in their jungle camps, and the government soldiers were playing U2 in their trucks. I think everyone was killing everyone else and listening to the same music... That is a good trick about this world, Sarah. No one likes each other, but everyone likes U2.
Chris Cleave
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We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.
Chris Cleave
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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.
Chris Cleave
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I write in the novel's afterword that our recent wars finish not with victory or defeat but with a calendar draw-down date and a presumption that we shall never be reconciled with the enemy.
Chris Cleave
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Andrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began.
Chris Cleave
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It was the month of May and there was warm sunshine dripping through the holes between the clouds, like the sky was a broken blue bowl and a child was trying to keep honey in it.
Chris Cleave
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I think that the relationship between two top-level athletes who are rivals is one of the most fascinating human relationships to explore. It's always one atom away from being a tragedy.
Chris Cleave
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The reason why I love people, and writing about them, is because they don't always respond with hate and anger. If they did I wouldn't have a story to tell. Who wants to know about someone who was brutalised and became brutal? I'm interested in the exceptions.
Chris Cleave
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Something I am now convinced of, after researching Everyone Brave, is that none of us is born courageous in all respects.
Chris Cleave
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It was hard not to be full of hope
Chris Cleave
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There's what people say, and there's what people mean, and I like to explore the difference between the two.
Chris Cleave
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Yet war doesn't end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
Chris Cleave
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If your face is swollen from the severe beatings of life, smile and pretend to be a fat man.
Chris Cleave
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So when I say that I am a refugee, you must understand that there is no refuge.
Chris Cleave
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The only bad days as a writer are the ones when you are too cowardly or too lazy to sit down at the keyboard and give it everything you have.
Chris Cleave
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your culture has become sophisticated, like a computer, or a drug that you take for a headache. You can use it, but you cannot explain how it works. Certainly not to girls who stack up their firewood against the side of the house.
Chris Cleave
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I’m telling you, trouble is like the ocean. It covers two thirds of the world.
Chris Cleave