Quotes by Chris Cleave

He really had experienced every tiniest increment of time in the four decades since then, and yet here he was surprised to be suddenly old and crippled. Turned out the rope didnt care if you noticed every daisy on the path to the gallows.

When death comes you do not stay for one minute in the place it has visited. Many things arrive after death-sadness, questions, and policemen- and none of these can be answered when your papers are not in order.

Andrew had a gift for deepening the incision he began.

...disaster, when it is quite sure of its own strength, will announce itself by hardly moving its lips...

When you make a man ashamed, you make him dangerous.

We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.

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 - shant we? - s we are startled at the end of every winter. We shall think: oh, I had quite forgotten there were three livable seasons.

Before you bombed my boy Osama I always thought an explosion was such a quick thing but now I know better. The flash is over very fast but the fire catches hold inside you and the noise never stops…I live in an inferno where you could shiver with cold Osama. This life is a deafening roar but listen. You could hear a pin drop.

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

Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and the moons on your dess? I though 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 dying. A scar means, I survivied.

How well it had suited me, that absolute license to march up to evildoers and demand who, what, where, when and why?

The reason why I love people, and writing about them, is because they dont always respond with hate and anger. If they did I wouldnt have a story to tell. Who wants to know about someone who was brutalised and became brutal? Im interested in the exceptions.

“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.”