Chris Cleave

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.

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.

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

The true moments of one's life were sadder for the fact that they must always be synchronized with the ordinary: with rail timetables, with breaks in traffic.

Murder me with bombs you poor lonely sod I will only build myself again and stronger. I am too stupid to know better I am a woman built on the wreckage of myself.

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

Exposing corruption, brandishing truth.

I want to be a journalist again. I want to make a difference in the world.

You are a mousetrap of a friend, all soft cheese and hard springs

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.

I move we get more wine,' Alistair said. 'What does the panel think?'...It was obvious that the entire war could be solved in this way. The trick would be to reach for a corkscrew instead, every time some brass hat ordered artillery.

Alistair smiled. 'How long this war has been.''I'll say. One hardly remembers how we lived before. Lightly - not worrying much.''Do you suppose we shall ever live that way again?''Oh, who knows? Given sufficient champagne and ether.''Maybe if we stay drunk to the end of our days we shan't remember.

There was less of him now. There was less of them all. Officers and men dragged themselves around in uniforms three sizes too big, new holes punched into every belt, every collar hanging loose. They were a garrison of skinny boys performing a play about soldiers.

Everything can be restored. If one won't believe that, how does one endure all this?

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

One didn't understand, until one had seen a great many bodies, the unconscious effort that one must be making every minute simply to keep one's hands and face and clothes clean. The world's surfaces were so filthy that the living touched them only with the tips of their fingers and the soles of their shoes. How grubby it was to die, to give up making that effort.

Her mother set to with the hairbrush again. __ut would that be so awful, darling? To be the prettiest thing in Brimscombe-and-Thrupp?___ should rather die.___ou nearly did.___es, but I tend to blame the Germans.

Then I__ tempted to die just to _ spite him.___hat__ the spirit that will win us the war.