Chris Cleave Quotes

The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.

The year of my birth, 1940, was the fulcrum of America in the twentieth century, when the nation was balanced precariously between the darkness of the Great Depression on one side and the storms of war in Europe and the Pacific on the other.

Roman's wife Sharon Tate had been murdered by Charles Manson the year before, but Roman had been through so much leaving the Warsaw ghetto that he was very strong and private.

My mother had a horrific life. At fourteen, she was in the Nazi concentration camps. Her sense about life now is, every day above ground is a good day.

'A Long Way Gone' says something about human nature that we try, most of the time, to ignore.

In order to endure death and horror one tends to kill ones own humanity, which is a much greater danger than not being able to bear it.

Even if hostilities do not begin, the world is menaced by economic collapse. Mistrust and suspicion reign everywhere. Beneath our very eyes the camps are forming, armies are gathering and a fearful struggle is being prepared in Europe. Is our continent to commit suicide in a terrifying war at the end of which no nation could call itself victor or vanquished, but in which the spiritual and material values created by centuries of civilization would founder?

In the extremity of war, character is revealed.

Those of us who were 12 or 13 when the war started were absolutely thrown into the mainstream. We had to grow up instantly and take care of ourselves.

I have been in lots of very intense life situations. I have been shot at, and I have been hungry, and I have been in solitude, and I have also briefly been behind bars. So in a way, I know the heart of men.

There comes a terrible moment to many souls when the great movements of the world, the larger destinies of mankind, which have lain aloof in newspapers and other neglected reading, enter like an earthquake into their own lives--when the slow urgency of growing generations turns into the tread of an invading army or the dire clash of civil war, and grey fathers know nothing to seek for but the corpses of their blooming sons, and girls forget all vanity to make lint and bandages which may serve for the shattered limbs of their betrothed husbands.

How many fears came between us? Earthquakes, diseases, wars where hell rained smoldering pus from skies made of winged death. Horror tore this world asunder. While inside the bleeding smoke and beyond the shredded weeping flesh we memorized tales of infinite good. -from The History Lesson

We leave it up to books and movies to talk about WWII on our behalf.

I don't understand why I'm not dead. When your heart breaks, you should die

Step by step, heart to heart, left right left. We all fall down like toy soldiers. Bit by bit, torn apart, we never win.

In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter, war spreading, families dying, the world in danger, I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.

At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done

I think it's a real gift to be faced with man's potential for extreme cruelty but also man's resilience and the fact that love really does conquer everything. It's the only answer to these kinds of atrocities and it's not a passive thing.

So many humans. So many colours. They keep triggering inside me. They harass my memory. I see them tall in their heaps, all mounted on top of each other. There is air like plastic, a horizon like setting glue. There are skies manufactured by people, punctured and leaking, and there are soft, coal-coloured clouds, beating, like black hearts. And then. There is death. Making his way through all of it. On the surface: unflappable, unwavering. Below: unnerved, untied, and undone.

War. What was it about the prospect of some bloody enterprises that reduced men to the level of animals?

and now, all these years later, it seem to him that the most horrible fact of human existence was that broken hearts mended

War is nothing but a microcosm of peace... it shows you life in a more intense way and that's how I continue to live it... for good or bad reasons.

I think that ordinary people who are placed in extraordinary circumstances find themselves pushed beyond their limits, and learn new truths about themselves.

Broken hearts healed. Maybe the cracks were always there, like thin scars, but they healed. People lived and worked, laughed and ate, walked and talked with those cracks For many, even the scars healed and they loved again.

Pleasures may turn a heart to stone, riches may make it callous, but sorrows cannot break it. Hearts live by being wounded.