Everyone Brave is Forgiven

by Chris Cleave

the pigeons flew up before her and their clacking wings were a thousand knives tapped against claret glasses, praying silence.

They were only human, even if they hadn’t yet made the effort to become tall.

It turned out that the only difference between children and adults was that children were prepared to put twice the energy into the project of not being sad.

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

the wind scoured the kiteless sky and set the empty swings rocking to their own orphaned frequency.

The windows rose from wide sills to Gothic arches; the gables were decked out with barge boards and topped with lanceolate finials. Mary thought these the most fun bits of the building: these spikes aimed skywards, impalers of trespassing angels.

There would come suitors who were taller, or richer, or—most dreadful of all—who could make her laugh. How he feared men who could make her laugh.

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

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

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

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.

Perhaps one died in slices, like a loaf.

Tens of thousands were dead now, and everyone left was sickened. This was something about war that they did not warn one of: that death was an illness of the living, a cumulative poison.

It was simply a peculiarity of the British that they could be stoical about two hundred and fifty nights of bombing, while the sight of her with a Negro child offended their sensibilities unbearably.

Hilda’s cigarette, forgotten, drooped a sadness of ash.

There was no ritual when one fell apart, society preferring to wait until one was lost entirely.

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.

The young see the world that they wish for. The old see the world as it is. You must tell me which you think the more honest.”

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

The bare oaks with their ageless trunks held up the woebegone sky.

I’ve learned that real life is more mysterious, frightening and fragile than anything one can make up. I’ve learned that real life doesn’t think freakish coincidences are a hackneyed plot device. Neither does real life shy away from destroying someone just because he or she is a sympathetic character.

I operate on the principle that a book is small and a reader is big.