Everyone Brave Is Forgiven Quotes

“But what good is it to teach a child to count, if you don't show him that he counts for something?”
― Chris Cleave, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven

“In the end I suppose we lay flowers on a grave because we cannot lay ourselves on it.”
― Chris Cleave, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven

“This was how a kind heart broke, after all: inward, making no shrapnel. Dear”
― Chris Cleave, Everyone Brave is Forgiven

“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, Everyone Brave is Forgiven

“It was an air one might still breathe, if everyone forgiven was brave.”
― Chris Cleave, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven

“I understand that your brain is large and perpetually at war with itself”
― Chris Cleave, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven

“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, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven

“Stupid is you can’t learn, ignorant is you haven’t learned yet.”
― Chris Cleave, Everyone Brave is Forgiven

“All the things we make exceptional are merely borrowed from the mundane and must without warning be surrendered to it.”
― Chris Cleave, Everyone Brave is Forgiven

“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, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven

“Women fall differently, that's all. We die by the stopping of our hearts, they by the insistence of theirs.”
― Chris Cleave, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven

“Everything can be restored. If one won't believe that, how does one endure all this?”
― Chris Cleave, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven

“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.”
― Chris Cleave, Everyone Brave is Forgiven

“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, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven

“Look at us, won't you? We are nation of glorious cowards, ready to battle any evil but our own.”
― Chris Cleave, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven

“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, Everyone Brave is Forgiven

“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.”
― Chris Cleave, Everyone Brave is Forgiven

“One does not rise above the everyday simply because one ought to.”
― Chris Cleave, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven

“What’s he like?” “Thoughtful. Interesting. Compassionate.” “These are English words for ugly.”
― Chris Cleave, Everyone Brave is Forgiven

“This helpful war. It makes us better people and then it tries to kill us.”
― Chris Cleave, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven

“How lovely was each breath. How peculiar that one had never noticed.”
― Chris Cleave, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven

“I was brought up to believe that everyone brave is forgiven, but in wartime courage is cheap and clemency out of season.”
― Chris Cleave, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven

“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, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven

“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, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven

“They spoke of small things at first, since it was best, when reattaching threads, to begin with the easiest knots.”
― Chris Cleave, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven

“I was brought up to believe that everyone brave is forgiven, but in wartime courage is cheap and clemency out of season. Unless”
― Chris Cleave, Everyone Brave is Forgiven

“I don't know. We've never done anything, have we? We've no talent but conversation.”
― Chris Cleave, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven

“Good luck. Take quinine if it's Cairo, take salt if it's the desert, take precautions if it's a local girl. Avoid gin unless good tonic is available, smoke no more than one pack, and keep anything made of metal on the outside of your skin. Dismiss.”
― Chris Cleave, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven

“Her mother set to with the hairbrush again. “But would that be so awful, darling? To be the prettiest thing in Brimscombe-and-Thrupp?”

“I should rather die.”

“You nearly did.”

“Yes, but I tend to blame the Germans.”
― Chris Cleave, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven

“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, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven