Top 160 Chris Cleave Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.”

— Chris Cleave

52. “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

53. “I’m not happy with just repeating myself.”

— Chris Cleave

54. “To be well in your mind you have first to be free.”

— Chris Cleave

55. “Murder me with bombs you poor lonely sod I will only build myself again and stronger. I am too stupid to know better I am a woman built on the wreckage of myself.”

— Chris Cleave

56. “If you cannot read the beautiful things that have happened in someone’s life, why should you care about their sadness?”

— Chris Cleave

57. “I understand that your brain is large and perpetually at war with itself.”

— Chris Cleave

58. “I think that there’s something extremely beautiful about the Olympic ideal and its motto – ‘Swifter, higher, stronger’ – it’s such a beautiful motto, and it celebrates everything which is the antithesis of death and dissolution and entropy.”

— Chris Cleave

59. “How could he even attempt it, after eight days and nights of bombing? And yet this is when he must write: now, in the lull between attacks... War made one do everything when one wasn’t at all ready. Dying, yes, but also living.”

— Chris Cleave

60. “Just beyond your sight, life might be moving in ways that were moments away from being revealed to you.”

— Chris Cleave

61. “Andrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began.”

— Chris Cleave

62. “We did not have hurry. We did not have electricity or fresh water or sadness either, because none of these had been connected to our village yet.”

— Chris Cleave

63. “April showers bring May flower.”

— Chris Cleave

64. “Everything can be restored. If one won’t believe that, how does one endure all this?”

— Chris Cleave

65. “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

66. “Perhaps this was what it was to grow up: this realization that the world was already staffed with people and that one was not particularly needed. She.”

— Chris Cleave

67. “We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.”

— Chris Cleave

68. “You are blind to the present and we are blind to the future.”

— Chris Cleave

69. “Me and Nkiruka, we watched through the window until the moon grew an extraordinary size, so big that it filled the window frame. We could see the face of the man in the moon, so close that we could see the madness in his eyes.”

— Chris Cleave

70. “The Daily Mail can’t say ‘asylum-seeker’ without saying ‘foreign criminal’ in the same sentence. I’m sure it’s practically editorial policy.”

— Chris Cleave

71. “It was not warm and not cold. There was no wind and the sky was very low and grey but it wasn’t raining. It was like they’d completely run out of weather.”

— Chris Cleave

72. “Look at us, won’t you? We are nation of glorious cowards, ready to battle any evil but our own.”

— Chris Cleave

73. “Stupid is you can’t learn, ignorant is you haven’t learned yet.”

— Chris Cleave

74. “This life is a deafening roar but listen. You could hear a pin drop.”

— Chris Cleave

75. “They spoke of small things at first, since it was best, when reattaching threads, to begin with the easiest knots.”

— Chris Cleave

76. “I like to push characters to extremes so they have to make really tough decisions and there is no life more extreme than that of an athlete.”

— Chris Cleave

77. “The true moments of one’s life were sadder for the fact that they must always be synchronized with the ordinary: with rail timetables, with breaks in traffic.”

— Chris Cleave

78. “When you make a man ashamed, you make him dangerous.”

— Chris Cleave

79. “I was hoping my life might make more sense from a great height.”

— Chris Cleave

80. “Perhaps life just turned a person who tried harder into a person who felt they must write it on someone else’s report.”

— Chris Cleave

81. “It was hard not to be full of hope.”

— Chris Cleave

82. “The Thames was cold and it was the colour of the dishwater at the end of the washing up. I remember looking up through it and seeing the light pale brown and far above and wondering if I would sink farther or float up to it. I stayed down for the longest time Osama. I wouldn’t mind drowning but I did float up in the end. Somehow I always seem to.”

— Chris Cleave

83. “If I can’t write it would be as if I died.”

— Chris Cleave

84. “Oh, I hope I don’t teach. Because look what we did: we saved the zoo animals and the nice children, and we damned the afflicted and the blacks. You know what I do every day in that classroom? I do everything in my power to make sure those poor souls won’t learn the obvious lesson.”

— Chris Cleave

85. “London had always had this trick of living in two time signatures at once – the urgent and the always – each in earshot of the other.”

— Chris Cleave

86. “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

87. “I’m a much better writer for being a father.”

— Chris Cleave

88. “All the things we make exceptional are merely borrowed from the mundane and must without warning be surrendered to it.”

— Chris Cleave

89. “Who knows which takes more courage – to die in battle, or to live in vain? It cuts all of us in two, I suppose.” Hamilton.”

— Chris Cleave

90. “The young see the world that they wish for. The old see the world as it is. You.”

— Chris Cleave

91. “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

92. “This was how a kind heart broke, after all: inward, making no shrapnel. Dear.”

— Chris Cleave

93. “There was less of him now. There was less of them all. Officers and men dragged themselves around in uniforms three sizes too big, new holes punched into every belt, every collar hanging loose. They were a garrison of skinny boys performing a play about soldiers.”

— Chris Cleave

94. “Bullets is okay. Bullets is quick.”

— Chris Cleave

95. “To be in love was to understand how alone one had been before.”

— Chris Cleave

96. “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

97. “What’s he like?” “Thoughtful. Interesting. Compassionate.” “These are English words for ugly.”

— Chris Cleave

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

— Chris Cleave

99. “I realized that I was carrying two cargoes. Yes, one of them was horror, but the other one was hope. I realized I had killed myself back to life.”

— Chris Cleave

100. “Palmer? Would you bring us a little brandy?” Back the pewter tray came, with glasses and decanters. Palmer set it down on the occasional table and let a measure of syrup into each of two glasses. He scalped an orange and placed a shaving of peel in each glass. These he compressed with a pestle sufficiently to release their oils but not to macerate them. He added a dash of bitters and a measure of brandy to each glass, finishing with ice.”

— Chris Cleave