Top 160 Chris Cleave Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.”

— Chris Cleave

2. “Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive. The next thing you know something fine will happen to her, something marvelous, and then she will turn around and smile.”

— Chris Cleave

3. “Studying psychology is fun because you’re always looking for the same things I think a writer should be looking for, which is the story behind the story.”

— Chris Cleave

Featured in: Fun Quotes

4. “We are a nation of glorious cowards, ready to battle any evil but our own.” Her.”

— Chris Cleave

5. “If your face is swollen from the severe beatings of life, smile and pretend to be a fat man.”

— Chris Cleave

6. “And thus love makes fools of us all.”

— Chris Cleave

7. “Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive.”

— Chris Cleave

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

8. “Looking after a very sick child was the Olympics of parenting.”

— Chris Cleave

9. “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

10. “On the girl’s brown legs there were many small white scars. I was thinking, Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and the moons on your dress? I thought that would be pretty too, and I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. 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

11. “It is possible to do good things with an imperfect situation.”

— Chris Cleave

12. “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.”

— Chris Cleave

13. “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

14. “However long the moon disappears, someday it must shine again.”

— Chris Cleave

15. “Even for a girl like me, then, there comes a day when she can stop surviving and start living. To survive, you have to look good or talk good. But to end your story well – here is the truth – you have to talk yourself out of it.”

— Chris Cleave

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

16. “I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.”

— Chris Cleave

17. “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

18. “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

19. “Life is extremely short and you cannot dance to current affairs.”

— Chris Cleave

20. “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

21. “I’m telling you, trouble is like the ocean. It covers two thirds of the world.”

— Chris Cleave

22. “You live in a world of machines and you dream of things with beating hearts. We dream of machines, because we see where beating hearts have left us.”

— Chris Cleave

23. “How I would love to be a British pound. A pound is free to travel to safety, and we are free to watch it go. This is the human triumph. This is called, globalisation. A girl like me gets stopped at immigration, but a pound can leap the turnstiles, and dodge the tackles of those big men with their uniform caps, and jump straight into a waiting airport taxi. Where to, sir? Western Civilisation, my good man, and make it snappy.”

— Chris Cleave

24. “So when I say that I am a refugee, you must understand that there is no refuge.”

— Chris Cleave

25. “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

26. “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

27. “In my world death will come chasing. In your world it will start whispering in your ear to destroy yourself. I know this because it started whispering to me when I was in the detention center.”

— Chris Cleave

28. “There’s what people say, and there’s what people mean, and I like to explore the difference between the two.”

— Chris Cleave

29. “At some point you just have to turn around and face your life head on.”

— Chris Cleave

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

— Chris Cleave

31. “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

32. “People wonder how they are ever going to change their lives, but really it is frighteningly easy.”

— Chris Cleave

33. “Our stories are the tellers of us.”

— Chris Cleave

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

34. “This was always my trouble when I was learning to speak your language. Every word can defend itself. Just when you go to grab it, it can split into two separate meanings so the understanding closes on empty air. I admire you people. You are like sorcerers and you have made your language as safe as your money.”

— Chris Cleave

35. “We’re often told that we live in a globalized world, and we talk about it all the time, but people don’t stop to think about what it means.”

— Chris Cleave

36. “I know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.”

— Chris Cleave

37. “Oh, you know. The lingering sensation that in pursuit of my own exacting goals and objectives I might not have been as generous in spirit as I could have been with regard to the needs and dreams of the people I cared most about or for whom I was emotionally responsible.”

— Chris Cleave

38. “I thought there’d be some black people.” “Hitler will only fight them in separate units. He’s a snob.”

— Chris Cleave

39. “We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.”

— Chris Cleave

40. “Exposing corruption, brandishing truth.”

— Chris Cleave

41. “This thing with being lovers, it isn’t like being married.”

— Chris Cleave

42. “But what good is it to teach a child to count, if you don’t show him that he counts for something?”

— Chris Cleave

43. “In the end I suppose we lay flowers on a grave because we cannot lay ourselves on it.”

— Chris Cleave

44. “For me and the girls from my village, horror is a disease and we are sick with it. It is not an illness you can cure yourself of by standing up and letting the big red cinema seat fold itself up behind you.”

— Chris Cleave

45. “That is the trouble with happiness-all of it is built on top of something that men want.”

— Chris Cleave

46. “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

47. “If I could not smile, I think my situation would be even more serious.”

— Chris Cleave

48. “I think that the relationship between two top-level athletes who are rivals is one of the most fascinating human relationships to explore. It’s always one atom away from being a tragedy.”

— Chris Cleave

49. “I was brought up to believe that everyone brave is forgiven, but in wartime courage is cheap and clemency out of season.”

— Chris Cleave

50. “I was carrying two cargoes. Yes, one of them was horror, but the other one was hope.”

— Chris Cleave