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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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Chris Cleave
Age: 51
Born: 1973
Born: May 14
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Didn
Stills
Still
Shaking
Pity
Cry
Deserve
Understood
Dead

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Life is extremely short and you cannot dance to current affairs.
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I know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.
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I was carrying two cargoes. Yes, one of them was horror, but the other one was hope.
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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.
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Andrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began.
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I'm not happy with just repeating myself.
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My whole life is my work.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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If your face is swollen from the severe beatings of life, smile and pretend to be a fat man.
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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.
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So when I say that I am a refugee, you must understand that there is no refuge.
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However long the moon disappears, someday it must shine again.
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I’m telling you, trouble is like the ocean. It covers two thirds of the world.
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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.
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People wonder how they are ever going to change their lives, but really it is frighteningly easy.
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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.
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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.
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