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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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Chris Cleave
Age: 51
Born: 1973
Born: May 14
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Weight
Survivor
Within
Carries
Talk
Carrie
Family
Recent
Everyone
Spoken
History
Rarely
Survivors
Families
Veterans
Tend
Veteran

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
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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.
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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?
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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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At some point you just have to turn around and face your life head on.
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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
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Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive
Chris Cleave
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Andrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began.
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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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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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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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[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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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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I'm a much better writer for being a father.
Chris Cleave
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Our stories are the tellers of us.
Chris Cleave
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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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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’m telling you, trouble is like the ocean. It covers two thirds of the world.
Chris Cleave