Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Chris Cleave
Age: 51
Born: 1973
Born: May 14
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Decision
Splits
Make
Emphasis
Life
Unfair
Savagely
Seconds
Disproportionate
Conviction
Ignores
Decisions
Seated
Places
Convictions
Deep
Split

More quotes by Chris Cleave

Image
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
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
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
Image
[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
Image
I think the recent cluster of WWII novels is so good because we have reached an optimal distance from the war. Just as a lens has its focal length, the novel also has its best distance from the action.
Chris Cleave
Image
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
Image
Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive
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
And thus love makes fools of us all.
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
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
Image
Yet war doesn't end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
Chris Cleave
Image
I’m telling you, trouble is like the ocean. It covers two thirds of the world.
Chris Cleave
Image
I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.
Chris Cleave
Image
If your face is swollen from the severe beatings of life, smile and pretend to be a fat man.
Chris Cleave
Image
I was carrying two cargoes. Yes, one of them was horror, but the other one was hope.
Chris Cleave
Image
People wonder how they are ever going to change their lives, but really it is frighteningly easy.
Chris Cleave
Image
I'm not happy with just repeating myself.
Chris Cleave
Image
I like to push characters to extremes so they have to make really tough decisions and there is no life more extreme than that of an athlete.
Chris Cleave