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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

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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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 bravery means a different thing to everyone.
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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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
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And thus love makes fools of us all.
Chris Cleave
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The future looks like gasoline. . . . crude oil . . . is the future before it has been refined. It is like a dream of the future, really, and like any dream it ends with a rude awakening.
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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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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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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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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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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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 know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.
Chris Cleave
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You travel here and you travel there, trying to get out from under the cloud, and nothing works, and then one day you realize you've been carrying the weather around with you.
Chris Cleave
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It was hard not to be full of hope
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