239 Quotes by Chris Cleave

on a bike ride through the Surrey Lanes, pedalling in my cotton dress through the hot fields blushing with poppies, freewheeling down a sudden dip into a cool wooded sanctum.

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

I did not want to tell her what happened, but I had to now. 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.

I understand that your brain is large and perpetually at war with itself

Mary leaned back, exhaled, and watched her smoke rise. 'What sort of man do you want anyway?'"Tall. Funny. Never came top of his class or pulled the wings off bees.""Yes, but I mean really? When all of this is over, and assuming we win -" ...Hilda snorted. "(I) just want a tall man and a stiff drink. You could even swap the adjectives.

Mary suppressed both a smile and a delightful suspicion that teaching might not be the worst way to spend the idle hours between breakfast and society.

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.

Look at us, won't you? We are nation of glorious cowards, ready to battle any evil but our own.

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 didn't care if you noticed every daisy on the path to the gallows.