Iman Elsayed > Iman's Quotes

“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, 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, Little Bee

“However long the moon disappears, someday it must shine again.”
― Chris Cleave, The Other Hand

“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, 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, Little Bee

“I know that the hopes of this whole human world can fit inside one soul.”
― Chris Cleave, 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, Little Bee

“I am a woman built upon the wreckage of myself.”
― Chris Cleave, Incendiary

“That is the trouble with happiness-all of it is built on top of something that men want.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“Isn't it sad, growing up? You start off like my Charlie. You start off thinking you can kill all the baddies and save the world. Then you get a little bit older, maybe Little Bee's age, and you realize that some of the world's badness is inside you, that maybe you're a part of it. And then you get a bit older still, and a bit more comfortable, and you start wondering whether that badness you've seen in yourself is really all that bad at all. You start talking about ten per cent."

Maybe that's just developing as a person, Sarah."

I sighed and looked out at Little Bee

Well," I said, "maybe this is a developing world.”
― Chris Cleave

“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, Little Bee

“I was carrying two cargoes. Yes, one of them was horror, but the other one was hope.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“And thus love makes fools of us all.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“What is an adventure? That depends on where you are starting from. Little girls in your country, they hide in the gap between the washing machine and the refrigerator and they make believe they are in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around them. Me and my sister, we used to hide in a gap in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around us, and make believe that we had a washing machine and a refrigerator. You live in a world of machines and you dream off things with beating hearts. We dream of machines, because we see where beating hearts have left us.”
― Chris Cleave

“If your face is swollen from the severe beatings of life, smile and pretend to be a fat man.”
― Chris Cleave

“Still shaking, in the pew, I understood that it isn't the dead we cry for. We cry for ourselves, and I didn't deserve my own pity.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“Psychiatry in this place is like serving an in-flight meal in the middle of a plane crash. If I wanted to make you well, as a doctor, I should be giving you a parachute, not a cheese-and-pickle sandwich.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“Nobody has the time to sit down and explain the first world from first principles.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“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.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“It was hard not to be full of hope”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“You may think that's funny Osama but you never can squeeze every last bit of pride out of a human being. It's like a tube of toothpaste. You can twist it and you can crush it but there's always a tiny bit left isn't there?”
― Chris Cleave, Incendiary

“The future looks like gasoline. . . . crude oil . . . is the future before it has been refined. It is like a dream of the future, really, and like any dream it ends with a rude awakening.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“I hope this letter reaches you (Osama) anyway. I hope it finds you before the Americans do otherwise I'm going to wish I hadn't bothered aren't I?”
― Chris Cleave, Incendiary

“Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“In your country, if you are not scared enough already, you can go to watch a horror film... 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 my standing up and letting the big red cinema seat fold itself up behind you. That would be a good trick... But the film in your memory, you cannot walk out of it so easily. Wherever you go it is always playing. So when I say that I am a refugee, you must understand that there is no refuge.”
― Chris Cleave

“...to survive, you must look good or talk even better.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“The best mirror is an old friend.”
― George Herbert

“You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”
― Dr. Seuss

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Anyway, it doesn't matter how much, how often, or how closely you keep an eye on things because you can't control it. Sometimes things and people just go. Just like that.”
― Cecelia Ahern