Mary had written the names of her thirty-one children on brown luggage labels and looped them through the top buttonholes of their overcoats. Of course the children had exchanged labels with one another the second her back was turned. They were only human, even if they hadn’t yet made the effort to become tall.

— Chris Cleave

Chris Cleave Quotes

The balloons’ snub noses swung left and right in the fickle breeze, giving them the anxious air of compasses abandoned by north.

— Chris Cleave

It was queer the way things crept: the night, and these feelings. One was brought up to scorn the tendency to despair. But it seemed that the darkness knew this, and found a way to reach one nevertheless. It was patient and subtle, gauging the heart’s output of light. Her confusion grew, the heart lucent and the mind lucifugous.

— Chris Cleave

The Americans were tall men on full rations and it clearly made no sense to them that exhaustion should have the last word in the common language of English. “How come?” Mary heard them yelling to each other, over the noise of the engines. “How come they just left it broken like this?

— Chris Cleave

Gloriously, I’ve also learned that people you meet in real life are very unrealistic. The marvelous problem for fiction is to capture this preposterous, implausible and blazingly eccentric life, and to put it in a cell overnight, to sober it up until it reads believably on the page. That’s what a novelist is: I’m not a creating god, I’m reality’s jailor.

— Chris Cleave

From my country you have taken its future, and to my country you have sent the objects from your past. We do not have the seed, we have the husk.

— Chris Cleave

Oh, thought Tom, so it finishes as quickly as this. All the things we make exceptional are merely borrowed from the mundane and must without warning be surrendered to it.

— Chris Cleave

This is the real reason why no one tells us Africans anything. It is not because anyone wants to keep my continent in ignorance. It is because nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles. Or maybe you would like to, but you can’t. 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.

— Chris Cleave

The dreams of my country are no different from yours – they are as big as the human heart.

— Chris Cleave

It was not the same as charging down a machine-gun nest armed only with a Bowie knife, or strapping in to the tail-gunner seat of a four-engined heavy bomber. And no one else would ever know, since one did not get a medal for letting go of a woman’s hand on a gray Saturday morning in the middle of a European war. But to have faith – that a lover would be constant and life clement – this did require courage in a city more disposed to beginnings than safe continuations. As.

— Chris Cleave

I sat in the ground, with the warm sun shining on my back, and I realized that the earth had not rejected me and the sunlight had not snapped me in two.

— Chris Cleave

And that is how it was, the first time I touched the soil of England as a free woman, it was not with the soles of my boots but with the seat of my trousers.

— Chris Cleave

What he had not understood, before battle, was that time could become a ribbon to be looped and pinned back to its center, the petals of a black rosette. I.

— Chris Cleave

In the history of the world there was not one example of a man ever having written a satisfactory letter to a woman who mattered to him.

— Chris Cleave

Why wander through your thoughts when you could drive through them quite recklessly, with sirens?

— Chris Cleave

Truly, this is the one thing that people from your country and people from my country agree on. They say, That refugee girl is not one of us. That girl does not belong. That girl is a halfling, a child of an unnatural mating, an unfamiliar face in the moon.

— Chris Cleave

One time he showed me a picture of the band. It was the picture from the CD box. One of the musicians in the picture, he had a lot of hair. It was black with tight curls and it sat on the top of his head like a heavy weight and it went right down the back of his neck to his shoulders. I understand fashion in your language, but this hair did not look like fashion, I am telling you, it looked like a punishment.

— Chris Cleave

There are no goats. That is why you have all these beautiful flowers.” “There were goats, in your village?” “Yes, and they ate all the flowers.” “I’m sorry.” “Do not be sorry. We ate all the goats.

— Chris Cleave

How lovely was each breath. How peculiar that one had never noticed.

— Chris Cleave

We must take turns, don’t you think? Every time one of us is buried like this, we shall dig the other out.

— Chris Cleave

You could have lost your gloves in the fog and found them half an hour later, still suspended in the air at wrist height.

— Chris Cleave
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