Chris Cleave

Quotes

1. So, I realized—life had finally broken through. How silly it looked now, my careful set of defenses against nature: my brazen magazine, my handsome husband, my Maginot line of motherhood and affairs. The world, the real world, had found a way through. It had sat down on my sofa and it would not be denied any longer.

2. 

   I think [Andrew] truly started to believe that Britain was sinking in to the sea. […] Now that Charlie was almost two I suppose I was looking into the future my child would have to inhabit, and realizing that bitching about it might possibly not be the most constructive strategy.

3. 

   Then I listened to my sister’s bones being broken one by one. That is how my sister died. […] When the men and the dogs were finished with my sister, the only parts of her that they threw into the sea were the parts that could not be eaten.

4. 

   Learning the Queen’s English is like scrubbing off the bright red varnish from your toenails, the morning after a dance. It takes a long time and there is always a little bit left at the end, a stain of red along the growing edges to remind you of the good time you had.”

5. 

   That summer—the summer my husband died—we all had identities we were loath to let go of. My son had his Batman costume, I still used my husband’s surname, and Little Bee, though she was relatively safe with us, still clung to the name she had taken in a time of terror. We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refuges from ourselves.

6. 

   Truly, this is the one thing that people from your country and people from my country agree on. They say, That refugee girl is not one of us. That girl does not belong. That girl is a halfling, a child of an unnatural mating, an unfamiliar face in the moon.”

7. 

   Most days I wish I was a British pound coin instead of an African girl. Everyone would be pleased to see me coming.”

That’s all the quotes.

7 quotes in the collection · come back when we add more