List of Chris Cleave Quotes

I Do Think It Is Harder To Acknowledge Our Strengths, Or To Forgive Ourselves And Each Other For Our Shortcomings, When There Has Not Been A Result We Can All Agree On. And It Is Certainly Impossible To Imagine Forgiving The Enemy While Their Animus Remains Undefeated. Yet War Doesn't End With Armistice, It Only Ends With Forgiveness And Reconciliation.

My Paternal Grandmother Drove Ambulances During The Regional Blitz, In Birmingham.

[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.

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.

We No Longer Need To Show People Being Brave: Instead, We Can Examine How They Became Brave. We Can Assume That They Didn't Start Out That Way. If We Allow That They Started Out Just Like Us, Then Their Journey Into Courage Becomes Both More Fascinating And More Impressive.

At This Point In Time The War [ Wwii] Is Close Enough To Still Feel Hotly Personal To A Writer, Yet Far Enough Away So That Jingoism And Heroics Are No Longer Required.

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.

We Leave It Up To Books And Movies To Talk About Wwii On Our Behalf.

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

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.

I Think My Ideal Man Would Speak Many Languages. He Would Speak Ibo And Yoruba And English And French And All Of The Others. He Could Speak With Any Person, Even The Soldiers, And If There Was Violence In Their Heart He Could Change It. He Would Not Have To Fight, Do You See? Maybe He Would Not Be Very Handsome, But He Would Be Beautiful When He Spoke. He Would Be Very Kind, Even If You Burned His Food Because You Were Laughing And Talking With Your Girlfriends Instead Of Watching The Cooking. He Would Just Say, 'ah, Never Mind'.

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.