Top 100 Claire North Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Claire North

2. “Single-minded dedication to just one thing, without rest, respite or distraction, is only conducive to migraines, not productivity.”

— Claire North

3. “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

4. “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

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

— Claire North

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

— Claire North

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

— Claire North

8. “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

9. “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

10. “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

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

— Claire North

12. “Cassandra did not resist. After the first year of being pulled by the hair into Agamemnon’s bed, hand at her throat, tongue wet, she had learned that screaming changed nothing. By the time Clytemnestra killed her, seven years later, Cassandra had given up on speech altogether, knowing no one would believe her, and no one would care. Thus died the prophetess of Troy, plaything of gods and men.”

— Claire North

13. “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

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

— Claire North

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

— Claire North

16. “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

17. “We call them mnemonics,” explained Virginia. “To put it simply, they remember everything.”

— Claire North

18. “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

19. “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

20. “Nothing is ever quite enough. No matter who you are, there’s always something more to be had, which could be yours if only you were someone else.”

— Claire North

21. “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

22. “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

23. “Knowledge is not a substitute for ingenuity, merely an accelerant.”

— Claire North

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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

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

— Claire North

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

— Claire North

29. “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

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

— Claire North

31. “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

32. “This is the world we live in. We are not heroes. We do not choose to be great; we have no power over our destinies. The scraps of freedom that we have are to pick between two poisons, to make the least bad decision we can, knowing that there is no outcome that will not leave us bruised, bloody on the floor.”

— Claire North

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

— Claire North

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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

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

— Claire North

38. “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

39. “It was a reminder of the old truth that for tyranny to flourish all it required was the complicity of good men. In China at that time how many millions of good men, I wondered, were silently watching while this louder, snappier minority of believers marched and sang their way towards famine and destruction?”

— Claire North

40. “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

41. “No one ever considers the question of bladder when dealing with matters of subterfuge.”

— Claire North

42. “For progress, we have eaten our souls up, and nothing matters anymore.”

— Claire North

43. “The assembly dissolves at this point into furious squabbling, accusation and insult. I glance quickly into the nearby shadows, into the hot places of the earth beneath their feet, for Eris, lady of discord, wondering if she has stolen into this little assembly – but no, this is entirely, absolutely the stupidity of man without the interference of gods. It is fascinating in its detail and pettiness.”

— Claire North

44. “The secret to being unafraid of the darkness is to challenge the darkness to fear you, to raise your eyes sharp to those few souls who stagger by, daring them to believe that you are not, in fact, more frightening than they are.”

— Claire North

45. “What is the point of me? Either to change a world–many, many worlds, each touched by the choices I make in my life, for every deed a consequence, and in every love and every sorrow truth–or nothing at all. A stranger takes the train to Leningrad.”

— Claire North

46. “Speaking Mandarin with a Russian accent is extremely difficult. Of all the languages I have learned, Mandarin took me the longest, and having to replicate the suitable tones while simultaneously presenting myself as a rather bumbling Soviet scholar was an exercise that caused me considerable distress. In.”

— Claire North

47. “Too many voices all at once on the internet, screaming, just all the time screaming, sometimes it’s hard to be heard. Sometimes I think that the world is full of screaming.”

— Claire North

48. “I catch her as she tumbles, lest her fall be ungraceful, a messy rending of gut and bone. I ease her to the ground lightly, put her head in my lap, stroke her brow, whisper sweet sounds without form to her. My queen, greatest of all queens in Greece, stares up at the sky and does not see her brothers in it... All eyes of gods and men depart, save I.”

— Claire North

49. “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

50. “I had spent an entire life praying for a miracle, and none had come. And now I looked at the stuffy chapel of my ancestors and saw vanity and greed, heard the call to prayer and thought of power, smelled incense and wondered at the waste of it all.”

— Claire North