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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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Chris Cleave
Age: 51
Born: 1973
Born: May 14
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Refugee
Refuge
Understand
Must

More quotes by Chris Cleave

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Everyone carries the weight of WWII with them in their recent family history, and yet it is rarely spoken about within families, because veterans and survivors don't tend to talk.
Chris Cleave
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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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Death, of course, is a refuge. It's where you go when a new name, or a mask and cape, can no longer hide you from yourself. It's where you run to when none of the principalities of your conscience will grant you asylum.
Chris Cleave
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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.
Chris Cleave
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Looking after a very sick child was the Olympics of parenting.
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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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 was carrying two cargoes. Yes, one of them was horror, but the other one was hope.
Chris Cleave
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The Daily Mail can't say 'asylum-seeker' without saying 'foreign criminal' in the same sentence. I'm sure it's practically editorial policy.
Chris Cleave
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Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive
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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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 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
Chris Cleave
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[My maternal grandmother ] was a teacher in London and elsewhere during the war, although the children she taught were not the lost children who feature in the novel - those come from my research.
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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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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Andrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began.
Chris Cleave
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I'm not happy with just repeating myself.
Chris Cleave
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The ways in which we are able to express courage also depend on the hand life deals us.
Chris Cleave
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Life is extremely short and you cannot dance to current affairs.
Chris Cleave