Chris Cleave Quotes

If I'm going to talk about an issue, I better know what it's about viscerally.

I wanted to write about looking at the world, so it's more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvellous and the terrible.

When you research someone, you actually get beyond your own preconceptions and become aware of the human being other than the image. You become empathetic and sympathetic in turn.

Once you really commence to see things, then you really commence to feel things.

We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts.

It's easy to be brave when they're not my fears.

Some good qualities are like the senses: Those who are entirely deprived of them can have no notion of them.

It's easy to misjudge others. The one thing I try to do with everything I write is open people's eyes to those they normally ignore or dismiss. To make people aware of the "other" side of things.

We see through others only when we see through ourselves.

We cannot protect something we do not love, we cannot love what we do not know, and we cannot know what we do not see. Or hear. Or sense.

All can hear, but only the sensitive can understand.

All the art of analysis consists in saying a truth only when the other person is ready for it, has been prepared for it by an organic process of gradation and evolution.

It was brave," countered Issa. "It was rare. It was love, and it was beautiful.

Not every man with a heart is understanding, nor every man with an ear a listener, and nor every man with eyes able to see.

A liberal education will impart an awareness of the amazing and precious complexity of human relationships. Since those relationships are violated more often out of insensitiveness than out of deliberate intent, whatever increases sensitiveness of perception and understanding humanizes life.

Until you've tasted it [anything], you can't really know it.

You need to see things, REALLY see them, feel them, live them, so you know what’s big and what’s little, what matters and what to put aside.

Courage is the quality most essential to understanding the language of the world.

People who are criticizing... don't really get it, because if they did, they would like it.

One must open men's eyes, not tear them out.

Wouldn't he know without being asked?' said Polly. 'I've no doubt he would,' said the Horse (still with his mouth full). 'But I've a sort of an idea he likes to be asked.

I have walked with people whose eyes are full of light but who see nothing in sea or sky, nothing in city streets, nothing in books. It were far better to sail forever in the night of blindness with sense, and feeling, and mind, than to be content with the mere act of seeing. The only lightless dark is the night of darkness in ignorance and insensibility.

People will say to you, "Oh, you are fearless." That is so not true. We should stop saying that about people. It's a slander, really.

That's why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward receptive insight. In their present state they can stare till doomsday and not see it, listen till they're blue in the face and not get it.

All I'm saying is that you should show some respect for what other people see with their eyes and feel with their fingers, even though it be the exact opposite.