quotes by Chris Cleave

"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 (Little Bee)

"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 (The Other Hand)

"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 (Little Bee)

"To be well in your mind you have first to be free."
— Chris Cleave (Little Bee)

"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 (Little Bee)

"Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles."
— Chris Cleave (Little Bee)

"Life is extremely short and you cannot dance to current affairs."
— Chris Cleave (Little Bee)

"The future looks like gasoline. . . . crude oil . . . is the future before it has been refined. It is like a dream of the future, really, and like any dream it ends with a rude awakening."
— Chris Cleave (Little Bee)

"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 (Little Bee)

"However long the moon disappears, someday it must shine again."
— Chris Cleave (The Other Hand)

""Isn't it sad, growing up? You start off like my Charlie. You start off thinking you can kill all the baddier and save the world. Then you get a little bit older, maybe Little Bee's age, and you realize that some of the world's badness is inside you, that maybe you're a part of it. And then you get a bit older still, and a bit more comfortable, and you start wondering whether that badness you've seen in yourself is really all that bad at all. You start talking about ten per cent."

"Maybe that's just developing as a person, Sarah."

I sighed and looked out at Little Bee

"Well," I said, "maybe this is a developing world.""
— Chris Cleave (The Other Hand)

"What is an adventure? That depends on where you are starting from. Little girls in your country, they hide in the gap between the washing machine and the refridgerator and they make believe they are in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around them. Me and my sister, we used to hide in a gap in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around us, and make believe that we had a washing machine and a refrigerator. You live in a world of machines and you dream off things with beating hearts. We dream of machines, because we see where beating hearts have left us.
"
— Chris Cleave (The Other Hand)

"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. Certainly not to girls who stack up their firewood against the side of the house. "
— Chris Cleave

"aNobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles."
— Chris Cleave (Little Bee)