Chris Cleave Quotes

32 Sourced Quotes

A scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.

Chris Cleave
If I could not smile, I think my situation would be even more serious.

Chris Cleave
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.

Chris Cleave
They say that in the hour before an earthquake the clouds hang leaden in the sky, the winds slows to a hot breath, and the birds fall quiet in the trees of the town square. Yes but these are the same portents that precede lunchtime, frankly.

Chris Cleave
Looking after a very sick child was the Olympics of parenting.

Chris Cleave
That is how we lived, happily and without hope. I was very young then, and I did not miss having a future because I did not know I was entitled to one.

Chris Cleave
The future looks like gasoline.... crude oil... is the future before it has been refined. It is like a dream of the future, really, and like any dream it ends with a rude awakening.

Chris Cleave
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
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
People wonder how they are ever going to change their lives, but really it is frighteningly easy.

Chris Cleave
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
So when I say that I am a refugee, you must understand that there is no refuge.

Chris Cleave
We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, 'I survived'.

Chris Cleave
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.

Chris Cleave
I was carrying two cargoes. Yes, one of them was horror, but the other one was hope.

Chris Cleave
Horror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it.

Chris Cleave
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
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.

Chris Cleave
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
On our honeymoon we talked and talked. We stayed in a beachfront villa, and we drank rum and lemonade and talked so much that I never even noticed what color the sea was. Whenever I need to stop and remind myself how much I once loved Andrew, I only need to think about this. That the ocean covers seven tenths of the earth's surface, and yet my husband could make me not notice it.

Chris Cleave
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
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.

Chris Cleave
Life is extremely short and you cannot dance to current affairs.

Chris Cleave
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
We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.

Chris Cleave
Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.

Chris Cleave
Is it my fault if I do not look like an English girl and I do not talk like a Nigerian? Well, who says an English girl must have skin as pale as the clouds that float across her summers? Who says a Nigerian girl must speak in fallen English...?

Chris Cleave
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.

Chris Cleave
However long the moon disappears, someday it must shine again.

Chris Cleave
I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.

Chris Cleave