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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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Chris Cleave
Age: 51
Born: 1973
Born: May 14
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Novel
Optimal
War
Lens
Action
Lenses
Also
Recent
Best
Novels
Good
Reached
Focal
Think
Length
Cluster
Thinking
Distance
Clusters

More quotes by Chris Cleave

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Looking after a very sick child was the Olympics of parenting.
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I'm not happy with just repeating myself.
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Death, of course, is a refuge. It's where you go when a new name, or a mask and cape, can no longer hide you from yourself. It's where you run to when none of the principalities of your conscience will grant you asylum.
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At some point you just have to turn around and face your life head on.
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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.
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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.
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I wanted to look at the differences between how we fought then and how we fight now, because the current lack of closure generates a state of psychological unease that is interesting to acknowledge and examine.
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My whole life is my work.
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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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It was hard not to be full of hope
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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.
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We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.
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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.
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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.
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Andrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began.
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Yet war doesn't end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
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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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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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There's what people say, and there's what people mean, and I like to explore the difference between the two.
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Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive
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