Chris Cleave (born 1973) is a British writer and journalist.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think all of us are intrigued to imagine what we as individuals would become, if we were ever tested as hard as that golden generation was.
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
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".
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. . . ?
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’m telling you, trouble is like the ocean. It covers two thirds of the world.
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.
We don't know our hearts until life puts us to the test, and WWII fascinates because it was the last time everyone was simultaneously pushed to their limit.
It is easier for a rich person to act on their principles than it is for someone with fewer choices (which is why it is all the more disappointing when a wealthy person plays to the crowd).
Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.
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.
There's what people say, and there's what people mean, and I like to explore the difference between the two.
My paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the regional Blitz, in Birmingham.
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'.
[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.
Yet war doesn't end with armistice, it only ends with forgiveness and reconciliation.