239 Quotes by Chris Cleave


  • Author Chris Cleave
  • Quote

    It was how mothers carried on, after all, with a glint in the eye that implied a sure clairvoyance and also that it was your turn to talk. This was the velvet rope mothers offered: enough silence to make a noose with. Mary.

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  • Author Chris Cleave
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    I’m always determined that as a novelist I’m going to go out there and research my characters very thoroughly before I start writing.

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  • Author Chris Cleave
  • Quote

    There’s what people say, and there’s what people mean, and I like to explore the difference between the two.

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  • Author Chris Cleave
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    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.

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  • Author Chris Cleave
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    Stupid is you can’t learn, ignorant is you haven’t learned yet.

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  • Author Chris Cleave
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    Mary had written the names of her thirty-one children on brown luggage labels and looped them through the top buttonholes of their overcoats. Of course the children had exchanged labels with one another the second her back was turned. They were only human, even if they hadn’t yet made the effort to become tall.

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  • Author Chris Cleave
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    One does not rise above the everyday simply because one ought to.

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