Quote

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

Chris Cleave

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Chris Cleave
Age: 51
Born: 1973
Born: May 14
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Cannot
Stories
Tellers
Choose
Stop
Start

More quotes by Chris Cleave

Image
I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.
Chris Cleave
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Something I am now convinced of, after researching Everyone Brave, is that none of us is born courageous in all respects.
Chris Cleave
Image
Would we be the heroes or the cowards of the piece? Would we follow orders or stick to our principles, if those two things ever conflicted? Would we be the brave ones who still found the capacity for love - and for laughter - even while we were terrified?
Chris Cleave
Image
Looking after a very sick child was the Olympics of parenting.
Chris Cleave
Image
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
Image
At some point you just have to turn around and face your life head on.
Chris Cleave
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I was carrying two cargoes. Yes, one of them was horror, but the other one was hope.
Chris Cleave
Image
You may think that's funny Osama but you never can squeeze every last bit of pride out of a human being. It's like a tube of toothpaste. You can twist it and you can crush it but there's always a tiny bit left isn't there?
Chris Cleave
Image
There was no quick grief for Andrew because he had been so slowly lost. First from my heart, then from my mind, and only finally from my life.
Chris Cleave
Image
The ways in which we are able to express courage also depend on the hand life deals us.
Chris Cleave
Image
My whole life is my work.
Chris Cleave
Image
Life is savagely unfair. It ignores our deep-seated convictions and places a disproportionate emphasis on the decisions we make in split seconds.
Chris Cleave
Image
Our stories are the tellers of us.
Chris Cleave
Image
It's extremely hard for athletes to accept what's happened to them sometimes. It's hard to be beaten by a small margin, and I've spoken with athletes who, for years afterward, have been tormented by the knowledge that, had they done something ever so slightly different, they could have been one-ten-thousandth of a second quicker.
Chris Cleave
Image
There's what people say, and there's what people mean, and I like to explore the difference between the two.
Chris Cleave
Image
Life is extremely short and you cannot dance to current affairs.
Chris Cleave