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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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Chris Cleave
Age: 51
Born: 1973
Born: May 14
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Fats
Pretend
Smile
Face
Faces
Men
Beatings
Life
Swollen
Severe

More quotes by 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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I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn't the most athletic guy at school.
Chris Cleave
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My maternal grandmother was in London during the Blitz. Indeed, the man she was dating before she met my grandfather was killed beside her in a cinema, in 1941, when a bomb came through the roof - a tragedy in which she herself was badly wounded.
Chris Cleave
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I wanted to look at the differences between how we fought then and how we fight now, because the current lack of closure generates a state of psychological unease that is interesting to acknowledge and examine.
Chris Cleave
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I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.
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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The ways in which we are able to express courage also depend on the hand life deals us.
Chris Cleave
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I’m telling you, trouble is like the ocean. It covers two thirds of the world.
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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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.
Chris Cleave
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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
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WWII was, without exaggeration, the biggest event in all of human history, and it is still within living memory.
Chris Cleave
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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
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Looking after a very sick child was the Olympics of parenting.
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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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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We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.
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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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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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