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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

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Chris Cleave
Age: 51
Born: 1973
Born: May 14
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Write
Draw
Reconciled
Writing
Defeat
Calendar
Never
Draws
Calendars
Victory
Presumption
Novel
Recent
Shall
Date
Enemy
Finish
War
Wars

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I was carrying two cargoes. Yes, one of them was horror, but the other one was hope.
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Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive
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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.
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Our own personal brand of courage - in relationships, in conflict, in our principles ­ - is as unique as our fingerprints.
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Yet war doesn't end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.
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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?
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People wonder how they are ever going to change their lives, but really it is frighteningly easy.
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My whole life is my work.
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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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It was hard not to be full of hope
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I'm a much better writer for being a father.
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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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The Daily Mail can't say 'asylum-seeker' without saying 'foreign criminal' in the same sentence. I'm sure it's practically editorial policy.
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Psychiatry in this place is like serving an in-flight meal in the middle of a plane crash. If I wanted to make you well, as a doctor, I should be giving you a parachute, not a cheese-and-pickle sandwich.
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If your face is swollen from the severe beatings of life, smile and pretend to be a fat man.
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WWII was, without exaggeration, the biggest event in all of human history, and it is still within living memory.
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The only bad days as a writer are the ones when you are too cowardly or too lazy to sit down at the keyboard and give it everything you have.
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I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn't the most athletic guy at school.
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Our stories are the tellers of us.
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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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