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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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Chris Cleave
Age: 51
Born: 1973
Born: May 14
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Living
History
Exaggeration
Stills
Event
Still
Biggest
Human
Memory
Humans
Events
Without
Memories
Within

More quotes by Chris Cleave

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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
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[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
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Courage is a muscle that develops through use. It's no use waiting for some inner fire to conveniently become apparent at the moment of crisis - that's cartoon stuff.
Chris Cleave
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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
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I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.
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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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
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I was carrying two cargoes. Yes, one of them was horror, but the other one was hope.
Chris Cleave
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Our stories are the tellers of us.
Chris Cleave
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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
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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
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People wonder how they are ever going to change their lives, but really it is frighteningly easy.
Chris Cleave
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Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
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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So when I say that I am a refugee, you must understand that there is no refuge.
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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I'm not happy with just repeating myself.
Chris Cleave
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And thus love makes fools of us all.
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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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