“On the girl's brown legs there were many small white scars. I was thinking, Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and the moons on your dress? I thought that would be pretty too, and I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Little Bee
“We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, 'I survived'.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Little Bee
“Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive. The next thing you know something fine will happen to her, something marvelous, and then she will turn around and smile.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Little Bee
“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. ”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Little Bee
“I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Little Bee
“I’m telling you, trouble is like the ocean. It covers two thirds of the world.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Little Bee
“A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Little Bee
“To be well in your mind you have first to be free.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Little Bee
“You travel here and you travel there, trying to get out from under the cloud, and nothing works, and then one day you realize you've been carrying the weather around with you.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Little Bee
“Life is extremely short and you cannot dance to current affairs.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Little Bee
“Wouldn't that be funny, if the oil rebels were playing U2 in their jungle camps, and the government soldiers were playing U2 in their trucks. I think everyone was killing everyone else and listening to the same music... That is a good trick about this world, Sarah. No one likes each other, but everyone likes U2.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Little Bee
“However long the moon disappears, someday it must shine again.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Little Bee
“Death, of course, is a refuge. It's where you go when a new name, or a mask and cape, can no longer hide you from yourself. It's where you run to when none of the principalities of your conscience will grant you asylum.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Little Bee
“It was the month of May and there was warm sunshine dripping through the holes between the clouds, like the sky was a broken blue bowl and a child was trying to keep honey in it.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Little Bee
“We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Little Bee
“Horror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Little Bee
“On the girl’s brown legs there were many small white scars. I was thinking, Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and moons on your dress? I thought that would be pretty too, and I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars a s beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, ‘I survived’.
In a few breaths’ time I will speak some sad words to you. But you must hear them as we have agreed to see scars now. Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means the storyteller is alive. The next thing you know, something fine will happen to her, something marvellous, and then she will turn round and smile.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Little Bee
“I was carrying two cargoes. Yes, one of them was horror, but the other one was hope.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Little Bee
“I know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Little Bee
“If I could not smile, I think my situation would be even more serious.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Little Bee
“This is the forked tongue of grief again. It whispers in one ear: return to what you once loved best, and in the other ear it whispers, move on.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Little Bee
“That is the trouble with happiness-all of it is built on top of something that men want.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Little Bee
“At some point you just have to turn around and face your life head on.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Little Bee
“I planned how I would kill myself in the time of Churchill (stand under bombs), Victoria (throw myself under a horse), and Henry the Eighth (marry Henry the Eighth)- Little Bee”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Little Bee
“On our honeymoon we talked and talked. We stayed in a beachfront villa, and we drank rum and lemonade and talked so much that I never even noticed what color the sea was. Whenever I need to stop and remind myself how much I once loved Andrew, I only need to think about this. That the ocean covers seven tenths of the earth's surface, and yet my husband could make me not notice it.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Little Bee
“We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Little Bee
“And thus love makes fools of us all.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Little Bee
“Life is savagely unfair. It ignores our deep-seated convictions and places a disproportionate emphasis on the decisions we make in split seconds.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Little Bee
“They say that in the hour before an earthquake the clouds hang leaden in the sky, the winds slows to a hot breath, and the birds fall quiet in the trees of the town square. Yes but these are the same portents that precede lunchtime, frankly.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Little Bee
“That is how we lived, happily and without hope. I was very young then, and I did not miss having a future because I did not know I was entitled to one.”
― Chris Cleave, quote from Little Bee
Chris Cleave
Born place: in London, The United Kingdom
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“I’d way rather defend myself against a man with a stick than a social worker with good intentions.”
― Wendelin Van Draanen, quote from Runaway
“We all live in a tragicomic situation, a life that is in part absurd simply because it is not of our own making. We are born into a disordered world, into a family we did not choose, into circumstances we would have had somewhat improved, and we are even called by a name we did not select. (40)”
― quote from If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him: The Pilgrimage Of Psychotherapy Patients
“maybe memories are like karaoke-where you realize up on the stage, with all those lyrics scrawling across the screen's bottom, and with everybody clapping at you, that you didn't know even half the lyrics to your all-time favourite song. Only afterwards, when someone else is up on stage humiliating themselves amid the clapping and laughing, do you realize that what you liiked most about your favourite song was precisely your ignorance of its full meaning- and you read more into it than maybe existed in the first place. I think it's better to not know the lyrics to your life.”
― Douglas Coupland, quote from The Gum Thief
“Temples and churches have become social centers. They have lost their original purpose because the minds of the people are more attracted to worldly things than to prayer. The lips repeat the prayer mechanically like a phonograph record, but the mind wanders to other places. (23-24)”
― Patañjali, quote from The Yoga Sutras
“And as the recession continues and our prospects look bleaker and bleaker, I’m excited. I look to the past to see what our future will be like. And in times of economic hardship and harsh governments, of pointless wars and mass unemployment, there was pop art and there was punk, there was hip hop and grafitti, there was acid house and riot grrrl. There was art and music and books that could bring you to your knees with their utter perfection. Because, when everything else is gone, all we’re left with is our imaginations.”
― Sarra Manning, quote from Adorkable
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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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