Chris Cleave

“I think, in common with a lot of novelists, I wasn't the most athletic guy at school.”

“One could always imagine that one's life, though smoldering in parts, might be undamaged in the west.”

“on a bike ride through the Surrey Lanes, pedalling in my cotton dress through the hot fields blushing with poppies, freewheeling down a sudden dip into a cool wooded sanctum.”

“Her mother set to with the hairbrush again. “But would that be so awful, darling? To be the prettiest thing in Brimscombe-and-Thrupp?”“I should rather die.”“You nearly did.”“Yes, but I tend to blame the Germans.”

“This helpful war. It makes us better people and then it tries to kill us.”

“The Daily Mail can't say 'asylum-seeker' without saying 'foreign criminal' in the same sentence. I'm sure it's practically editorial policy.”

“It's extremely hard for athletes to accept what's happened to them sometimes. It's hard to be beaten by a small margin, and I've spoken with athletes who, for years afterward, have been tormented by the knowledge that, had they done something ever so slightly different, they could have been one-ten-thousandth of a second quicker.”

“People spoke in whispers, as if the war was listening”

“There are countries of the world, and regions of one's own mind, where it is unwise to travel.”

“What is the good of influence if one can only use it on strangers?”

“For me and the girls from my village, horror is a disease and we are sick with it. It is not an illness you can cure yourself of by standing up and letting the big red cinema seat fold itself up behind you.”

“Sorry. But it isn’t for us to change how things are. I’m just an administrator. You’re just a teacher.”“Oh, I hope I don’t teach. Because look what we did: we saved the zoo animals and the nice children and we damned the afflicted and the blacks. You know what I do every day in that classroom? I do everything in my power to make sure those poor souls won’t learn the obvious lesson.”“If I were you,” said Tom, “I should stick to reading, writing and arithmetic.”“But what good is it to teach a child to count, if you don’t show him that he counts for something?”

“I'm really interested in people's decisions.”

“Then I’m tempted to die just to … spite him.”“That’s the spirit that will win us the war.”

“I think that there's something extremely beautiful about the Olympic ideal and its motto - 'Swifter, higher, stronger' - it's such a beautiful motto, and it celebrates everything which is the antithesis of death and dissolution and entropy.”

“In my world death will come chasing. In your world it will start whispering in your ear to destroy yourself. I know this because it started whispering to me when I was in the detention center.”

“Mary leaned back, exhaled, and watched her smoke rise. 'What sort of man do you want anyway?'"Tall. Funny. Never came top of his class or pulled the wings off bees.""Yes, but I mean really? When all of this is over, and assuming we win -" ...Hilda snorted. "(I) just want a tall man and a stiff drink. You could even swap the adjectives.”

“I did not want to tell her what happened, but I had to now. 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.”

“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.”

“I think that the relationship between two top-level athletes who are rivals is one of the most fascinating human relationships to explore. It's always one atom away from being a tragedy.”