Top 100 Claire North Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “You argue complexity as an excuse for inaction?”

— Claire North

2. “There is no loneliness more lonely than to be alone in a crowd. No awkwardness more unsettling than the inside joke you do not comprehend.”

— Claire North

3. “If Pietrok-111 was a one-horse town, Pietrok-112 was the glue factory where that horse went to die.”

— Claire North

4. “People are just people, doing people things. Sometimes they’re stupid, and sometimes they’re desperate, and a lot of the time it’s just bad luck. Don’t get your knickers in a twist over people.”

— Claire North

5. “Words are made by history, we build them and they change meaning through time, but the music they play...”

— Claire North

6. “He who is silent is seen to consent.”

— Claire North

7. “Soon sirens would sound, and stop, and the city would listen for the low drone of the bombers, the deep clearing of death’s throat as he prepared to sing.”

— Claire North

8. “Your face is your fortune! Don’t spend it all at once!”

— Claire North

9. “Needless to say, most Cronus Club members during the conflict like to move to less fraught areas of the world, such as into the rather more stable heartland of the Ottoman empire, where, while the sultans may be mad during this time, at least their mothers are not.”

— Claire North

10. “It is said that there are three stages of life for those of us who live our lives in circles. These are rejection, exploration, and acceptance.”

— Claire North

11. “Marcus Aurelius, AD 121-180, author of Meditations. Quoth said emperor: It is not death a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live. And also: You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realise this, and you will find strength.”

— Claire North

12. “Kenamon takes his time to consider this. Penelope does not mind. The silence of men is a novel experience, and she is prepared to thoroughly enjoy it.”

— Claire North

13. “One day people will just say what they mean, and business will be conducted properly.”

— Claire North

14. “It is a death of the soul by a thousand cuts, and the falling skies are merely the laughter of the executioner going about his business.”

— Claire North

15. “It is perhaps the simplicity of his affection, the patience of his understanding and loyalty that makes him too easy to love, for his love is taken for granted by many, who give back nothing in return.”

— Claire North

16. “When you have seen the whole world, the old words said, there is always Greenland left.”

— Claire North

17. “My dad was blown up by a tank in Poland, but he left us the car. You want a ride?”

— Claire North

18. “Dr August, there is no greater isolation a man may experience than to be lonely in a crowd. He may nod, and smile, and say the right thing, but even by this pretence his soul is pushed further away from the kinship of men.”

— Claire North

19. “Were we, all of us, so used to apathy and deceit that not one had bothered to raise the question of it? Did we all take betrayal so much for granted?”

— Claire North

20. “I have lead a thoroughly despicable life. Or rather... not despicable. My evils have been ordinary evils. My sins against the world are daily, little sins that no one would question. I am a normal man. I am a normal man, and have done no wrong, and there is a place in hell waiting for me.”

— Claire North

21. “Mental health professionals of the 1960s make their 1990s counterparts look like Mozarts trampling upon Salieri’s lesser work.”

— Claire North

22. “No one’s really racist any more, just as no one’s really sexist. They’ve just got their view about things, you see.”

— Claire North

23. “Levity and sincerity are not antonyms. We take pleasure in playing chess, but that does not mean we make wasteful moves. You.”

— Claire North

24. “Consequences are only for the ones who stay behind.”

— Claire North

25. “All things are chance. Nature is chance. Life is chance. It is a human madness to cry and find rules where there are none, to invent constraints where none exist. The only thing that matters is the choice. So choose.”

— Claire North

26. “The press, the media, the internet – they’ll make the noise, make the screaming, the screaming all the time, and the truth and my voice will be lost. The blaming and the noise, human things, they’ll make it about human things, not the truth. How can anyone live with it? How can anyone live with so much screaming in their lives, all the time?”

— Claire North

27. “So, having known what euphoria is, it remains precisely that–a word with longing attached, but no meaning when actually experiencing the thing.”

— Claire North

28. “Three daughters of Sparta became three queens in Greece, and I love them, power in their voices and fire in their eyes, even Penelope, even the one who smiles and says she does it for her husband, I love her, I love her. But no one ever said the gods did not have favourites, and it is Clytemnestra I love best, my queen above all, the one who would be free.”

— Claire North

29. “The rituals you make, the devotions you perform, they are what binds you to yourself. If you do not have them, if you have not found them within you, you are nothing, and the desert is all. I’m.”

— Claire North

30. “They say that the mind cannot remember pain; I say it barely matters, for even if the physical sensation is lost, our recollection of the terror that surrounds it is perfect.”

— Claire North

31. “Only for the ones we love do we remain, painted dolls in the playhouse of this life.”

— Claire North

32. “True fear is the fear of doubt; it is the mind that will not sleep, the open space at your back where the murderer stands with the axe. It is the gasp of a shadow passed whose cause you cannot see, the laughter of a stranger whose laugh, you know, laughs at you.”

— Claire North

33. “As if a second Einstein will one day sit up in his bed and exclaim, ‘Mein Gott! Ich habe es gesehen!’ and that’s it, the universe comprehended.”

— Claire North

34. “I want to take him down, down, to the cold archives beneath the temple, to the tunnles where we keep the past, to show him selfies and pictures of food, jokes and terrible puns in dead, archaic scripts, tell him, look, look – look at people living. Look how beautiful it is to be alive.”

— Claire North

35. “The world is ending,” she said. “The message has come down from child to adult, child to adult, passed back down the generations from a thousand years forward in time. The world is ending and we cannot prevent it. So now it’s up to you.”

— Claire North

36. “When I am optimistic, I choose to believe that every life I lead, every choice I make, has consequence. That I am not one Harry August but many, a mind flicking from parallel life to parallel life, and that when I die, the world carries on without me, altered by my deeds, marked by my presence.”

— Claire North

37. “The trick with a truly successful intimidation is not to rely on volume or obscenity, but to cultivate that quiet certainty which informs any listener that your people will do the shouting for you, should the moment come.”

— Claire North

38. “People always find difficult truths harder than easy lies.”

— Claire North

39. “They can respond to any situation with a two-dollar retort from a self-help book at a pinch. Is your father dead? He’s gone to a better place. Have you lost your job? Stay strong – if you believe in yourself, you’ll find a way. Husband left you, taking the kids? You can fight this one, and with the strength you have inside and the love of your children, you can win. The world is boiled down to aphorisms and fairytales. I.”

— Claire North

40. “So each generation set out to find more of its kind, and within just a few cycles of birth and death, the Club had spread not only through space, but also time, propagating itself forwards into the twentieth century and back into the Middle Ages, the death of each member spreading the word of what it was to the very extremes of the times in which they lived.”

— Claire North

41. “Surely I could not be the only creature on this earth who favoured prolonged incubation as a safer method of development than puberty?”

— Claire North

42. “Athena watches from the shore. Artemis prowls in the forest. And in the belly of the earth, the Furies are stirring.”

— Claire North

43. “When you are alone, even the quiet is full of monsters.”

— Claire North

44. “We all knew, of course. Everyone knows, but no one looks. We don’t look because if we look it makes us evil because we aren’t doing something about it, or it makes us sad because we can’t do anything about it, or it proves that we’re monsters when we always thought we were righteous because we won’t do anything about it. Either way, safer not to look.”

— Claire North

45. “We all die. We don’t have to live our lives fearing it.”

— Claire North

46. “Perfect people always have a solution to a problem, you see. But what do you do when words fail? Truth: sometimes a murderer cannot be found. Truth: sometimes your children are taken and you are left behind. Truth: poverty is a prison. Truth: disease and age come to us all. These are so terrifying, we program them out of the human brain.”

— Claire North

47. “I stared at Constance and wondered if, in her way, she wasn’t quite, quite mad. Not a neurological madness, not a disease of the mind, but rather a cultural madness, an infection of expectations which corrupted her perception of what should be and what actually was. Under any other circumstances I would have been praised as a genius, an unmitigated hero and quite possibly a model for social reform in stodgy times; but to Constance all these things made me a rebel.”

— Claire North

48. “Any woman who gives merely all she has to give, and then has no more left in her, we condemn to Tartarus’s burning fields, and simply say: it is for the children.”

— Claire North

49. “Forgive me,” I wrote at the bottom. “I did not think I would break.”

— Claire North

50. “Luck is sometimes merciful. The Game never is.”

— Claire North