Chris Cleave

Quotes

1. Save [Little Bee] and there’s a whole world of them behind her. A whole swarm of Little Bees, coming here to feed.”

2. 

   I smiled and watched Charlie running away with the children , with his head down and his happy arms spinning like propellers, and I cried with joy when the children all began to play together in the sparkling foam of the waves that broke between worlds at the point. It was beautiful […] and that is a word I do not need to explain to you, because now we are all speaking the same language

3. 

   In place of my finger is a stump, a phantom digit that used to be responsible for the E, D, and C keys on my laptop. I can’t rely on E, D, and C anymore. They go missing when I need them most. Pleased becomes please. Ecstasies becomes stasis.

4. 

   I closed my eyes and listened to the hum of the fluorescent lights, the buzzing of the fax machines, and the fluid chatter of the editorial girls on their phones to fashion houses. It all seemed suddenly insane, like wearing a little green bikini to an African war.

5. 

   The boy’s father had dark skin, darker even than my own, and the boy’s mother was a white woman. They were holding hands and smiling at their boy, whose skin was light brown. It was the color of the man and the woman joined in happiness. It was such a good color that tears came into my eyes.

6. 

   I’ve spent two years denying what happened on that beach. Ignoring it, letting it fester. That’s what Andrew did too, and it killed him in the end. I’m not going to let it kill me and Charlie

7. 

   They told us we must be disciplined to overcome our fears. This is the discipline I learned: whenever I go into a new place, I work out how I would kill myself there. In case the men come suddenly, I make sure I am ready.

8. 

   I stowed away in a great steel boat, but the horror stowed away inside me. When I left my homeland I thought I had escaped—but out on the open sea, I started to have nightmares. I was naïve to suppose I had left my country with nothing.

9. 

   The gasoline flowing through the pump made a high-pitched sound, as if the screaming of my family was still dissolved in it. The nozzle of the gasoline hose went right inside the fuel tank of Sarah’s car, so that the transfer of the fluid was hidden.

10. 

    “I just think this is not our affair and so…”

11. 

    Yu nivver notice dey interview rooms didn’t have no windows? Me swear to yu, dat man’s ooman mus kept her legs cross for da last ten years, de way he took me up on me offer. An it wasn’t jus on de one day, mind. It took de man four interviews fore he was certain me papers was in order.”

12. 

    How calm my eyes were, since that day on the beach in Africa. When there has been a loss so fundamental I suppose that to lose just one more thing—a finger, perhaps, or a husband—is of absolutely no consequence at all.