Top 160 Chris Cleave Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “A girl like me gets stopped at immigration.”

— Chris Cleave

102. “One does not rise above the everyday simply because one ought to.”

— Chris Cleave

103. “This helpful war. It makes us better people and then it tries to kill us.”

— Chris Cleave

104. “Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.”

— Chris Cleave

105. “There was something about the star, rising above the stable, that still pulled a crowd in from the fields.”

— Chris Cleave

106. “The first problem of war was that no one was any good at it yet.”

— Chris Cleave

107. “The heart was a bicameral thing, both stoical and skittish. Who was to say that it mightn’t endure the years of separation and the abrupt reversals of fate, only to be repulsed by a misaligned vase, by a lipsticked tooth, by a hundredth of an ounce of ash?”

— Chris Cleave

108. “Look, do you believe in the institution of marriage?” “Of course.” “And you accept that such beautiful lightning cannot strike you twice?” “Well yes, I suppose – ” “Then shouldn’t you get a ring on her as soon as possible?”

— Chris Cleave

109. “You are a mousetrap of a friend, all soft cheese and hard springs.”

— Chris Cleave

110. “It is good to live like this. Once you are ready to die, you do not suffer so badly from the horror.”

— Chris Cleave

111. “Don’t you think we shall all be kinder to one another? I hope one’s class will matter less and one’s convictions more. I hope we might be more inclined to pardon one another for our errors with both.”

— Chris Cleave

112. “The worst thing would be to decide that it was love, and then to discover – after one was taken – that it hadn’t been. No: the worst thing would be to decide that it wasn’t love, and then to discover years later – old and unconsoled – that it had been. No: the worst thing – the worst, worst thing – was this having to decide.”

— Chris Cleave

113. “One didn’t understand, until one had seen a great many bodies, the unconscious effort that one must be making every minute simply to keep one’s hands and face and clothes clean. The world’s surfaces were so filthy that the living touched them only with the tips of their fingers and the soles of their shoes. How grubby it was to die, to give up making that effort.”

— Chris Cleave

114. “The eye may be an obligate scout but the heart is not an incurable folllower.”

— Chris Cleave

115. “But the film in your memory, you cannot walk out of it so easily. Wherever you go it is always playing. So when I say that I am a refugee, you must understand that there is no refuge.”

— Chris Cleave

116. “If the war had proved anything it was that life had unexpected resistance to the instruments with which men had been issued. Simonson.”

— Chris Cleave

117. “I’m always determined that as a novelist I’m going to go out there and research my characters very thoroughly before I start writing.”

— Chris Cleave

118. “Perhaps this was what love was like after all- not the lurch of going over a humpback bridge, and not the incandescence of fireworks, just the quiet understanding that one should take a kind hand when it was offered, before all light was gone from the sky.”

— Chris Cleave

119. “My whole life is my work.”

— Chris Cleave

120. “What was war, after all, but morale in helmets and jeeps? And what was morale if not one hundred million little conversations, the sum of which might leave men brave enough to advance? The true heart of war was in small talk.”

— Chris Cleave

121. “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

122. “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

123. “Here was the remainder of ten thousand educations, the bones drifted down to this depth. It was the fossil of one’s country. She ached, because the war had cut the thin cord that bound each child to its ancestors with links made from cross-stitch and calligraphy.”

— Chris Cleave

124. “Yes but he is a man though, don’t you see? You could knit one quicker than you can make one fit off-the-shelf.”

— Chris Cleave

125. “The only bad days as a writer are the ones when you are too cowardly or too lazy to sit down at the keyboard and give it everything you have.”

— Chris Cleave

126. “It was an air one might still breathe, if everyone forgiven was brave.”

— Chris Cleave

127. “Women fall differently, that’s all. We die by the stopping of our hearts, they by the insistence of theirs.”

— Chris Cleave

128. “To be in love was to understand how alone one had been before. It was to know that if one were ever alone again, there would be no exemption from the agony of it. It wasn’t the happiest feeling.”

— Chris Cleave

129. “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

130. “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

131. “After the war of course it will be like the start of spring, which is always so brilliantly sudden. The leaves will burst back onto the trees and close the gaps between the branches and we shall be startled – shan’t we? – s we are startled at the end of every winter. We shall think: oh, I had quite forgotten there were three livable seasons.”

— Chris Cleave

132. “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

133. “I’m really interested in people’s decisions.”

— Chris Cleave

134. “Life took longer to reassemble than it did to blow apart, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t be lovely, providing that one remembered to go for country walks, and to tune the wireless to music.”

— Chris Cleave

135. “But you are impossible, don’t you see? My other teachers are dazzled by you, or disheartened. And you are overconfident. You befriend the children, when it is not a friend that they need.”

— Chris Cleave

136. “He stepped on the unexploded artillery shell, and it tore him apart.”

— Chris Cleave

137. “I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn’t the most athletic guy at school.”

— Chris Cleave

138. “Before, life had been a tradition, a tendency to forgiveness, a regression to the mean. The city she loved had been one of plane trees that had grown for three centuries, of bridges improved as horse gave way to steam, of great coordinated endeavors in which every convergent component could be relied upon; of symphonies. But now any light could be snuffed without warning.”

— Chris Cleave

139. “Charlie put his head on one side to watch. The ears of his Batman hood flopped over. He said, “That is the Joker, isn’t it?” “No Charlie. That is the prime minister.” “Is he a goody or a baddy?” I thought to myself. “Half the people think he is a goody and the other half think he is a baddy.” Charlie giggled. “That’s silly,” he said. “That is democracy,” I said. “If you did not have it, you would want it.”

— Chris Cleave

140. “There in the sweet sacking smell of the mail bags he understood that he was dying, and it pleased him that he was going in the company of so many soft words home.”

— Chris Cleave

141. “It was how mothers carried on, after all, with a glint in the eye that implied a sure clairvoyance and also that it was your turn to talk. This was the velvet rope mothers offered: enough silence to make a noose with. Mary.”

— Chris Cleave

142. “I do not know why the mind chooses these small things to break itself on.”

— Chris Cleave

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

— Chris Cleave

144. “You will laugh at me-silly village girl-for staring at an ice cube like this. You will laugh, but this was the first time I had seen water made solid. It was beautiful-because if this could be done, then perhaps it could be done to everything else that was always escaping and running away and vanishing into sand or mist.”

— Chris Cleave

145. “Do you remember back when you felt you could actually do something to make the world better?” “You’re talking to the wrong man. I work for central government, remember? Actually doing something is the mistake we’re trained to avoid.”

— Chris Cleave

146. “They say the eye sees, but there’s a blind place in the mind.” “And I say it is lack of effort. You must hold him to the same standard as everyone else. Because where should it stop, this fashionable clemency, once we allow that there are things we can see and yet be blind to?” The singing voices swelled in the cellar and the bombs gave the percussion, and the great injured city went further into night. “Oh, I don’t know, darling. I don’t know where it will stop.”

— Chris Cleave

147. “You know what worries me about the enemy? It’s the violence. It is almost as if he thinks he can solve every problem this way.”

— Chris Cleave

148. “When the hour had come for the war to take him away, that had been the first and last moment she had known without doubt that she loved him. One knew how one felt only when things ended. And.”

— Chris Cleave

149. “It was a patient business, talking comets down to the speed of life.”

— Chris Cleave

150. “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