Top 100 Claire North Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 3

51. “Who are you, god that you would become, to destroy the world in your search for knowledge?”

— Claire North

52. “The feeling was exhilarating at first, until the discomfort of the settling night and the damp cold eating through my boots reminded me that exhilaration held nothing over reliable hygiene and warm sheets.”

— Claire North

53. “Born some time in the mid-1920s, at her oldest she had lived to see planes fly into the World Trade Center. “I remember thinking,” she would say, “how frustrating it was that I wouldn’t live long enough to see what happened next.” But she interrogated the kalachakra of the Club, the younger members, those born in the 1980s and 1990s, who shook their heads sadly and said, “You’re not missing anything.”

— Claire North

54. “Is there innocence in ignorance? And if there is, do we tolerate other for their innocence’s sake?”

— Claire North

55. “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

56. “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.”

— Claire North

57. “We’d been told that the village was already liberated, that there would be no resistance, but there it was, sat between the bakery and the church like a horsefly on a slice of melon. We’d been so relaxed we didn’t even notice it until the barrel swung round towards us like the eye of a muddy crocodile and its jaws released the shell that killed two of us outright and young Tommy Kenah three days later in his hospital bed.”

— Claire North

58. “It is petty, I know, to still find oneself frustrated by how bland the food is for so much of my early life, or how long it takes for central heating to become ubiquitous.”

— Claire North

59. “Beware that child who would spill his mother’s blood. Though the gods themselves may turn away, the Furies will not.”

— Claire North

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

— Claire North

61. “His ignorance of the past was almost as profound as his ignorance of the future.”

— Claire North

62. “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

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

— Claire North

64. “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

65. “God, but he lied beautifully; it was a masterclass. If I hadn’t been concentrating so hard on my own deceit, I would have stood up and applauded.”

— Claire North

66. “My loss of faith was not revelatory, nor intensely distressing. It was a prolonged growth of resignation, one which the events of my life had only reinforced, until I was forced to conclude that any conversations I had with a deity were entirely one way.”

— Claire North

67. “A man three parts moustache to one part facial features responded to “Darling!” with the dutiful twitch of one who has chosen not to fight the inevitable. “Mr August is British, would you ever have guessed?”

— Claire North

68. “The mind struggles to re-create the joy of a first kiss, but somehow manages to recall the terror of pain, the flush of humiliation and the burden of guilt with a startling clarity.”

— Claire North

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

— Claire North

70. “Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact.”

— Claire North

71. “In a way, the nausea was worse than the pain. Pain can be drowned, but nausea eats through even the most delicious opiates and cutting chemicals.”

— Claire North

72. “There was such hatred in Clytemnestra’s eyes, which never left his face – it was an intoxicant unlike any the tyrant had seen before. “I’ll have that.′ He thought. ″I’ll break that.”

— Claire North

73. “And in that second, we, who have so long stood and watched, feel a shudder as her gaze sweeps the room, and know that she sees us too. She sees us, impossible though it is, and she knows. She knows who we are, and what we desire, and in that moment when we fear that she will destroy us all, instead it seems to us that she smiles.”

— Claire North

74. “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

75. “That’s a really nice thought and I’m grateful for it, but there comes a point when one realizes that gratification of the flesh is only so fulfilling. It’s fantastic while it lasts, but comes with so many questions of emotional baggage and doubt that frankly I begin to question whether the grief involved outweighs the satisfaction gained.”

— Claire North

76. “I know it doesn’t sound very nice, Harry, but then neither does damaging yourself for the sake of others, as you will then require fixing, and others will be damaged in the attempt, and so it goes on and on and on, and frankly everyone ends up a worse mess than they were to begin with.”

— Claire North

77. “The world is boiled down to aphorisms and fairy tales.”

— Claire North

78. “They say that the mind cannot remember pain;.”

— Claire North

79. “Perhaps you don’t hate the British,” I mused. “Perhaps it is simply injustice.” “Of course!” she tutted, not turning her head from her examination of the road before us. “Of course it is injustice! But when injustice wears the same pasty face, you make connections, no? It is not truth. It is simply how the heart works.”

— Claire North

80. “Dawn should be bloody after a battle, yet it so rarely is. Too many wars are fought beneath her shimmering gaze for her to turn crimson for any but the most spectacular of affairs.”

— Claire North

81. “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

82. “Every human grief you will ever experience has been experienced by humans living and humans yet to come. There is no readiness for it, nor no easing of the pain, but ma’am, for what it’s worth, I think you should know that all of humanity that was, is and will be is with you now, by your side.”

— Claire North

83. “After a night of drinking, she would be a pale, starling-sized creature, but now, in this place, she is moonlight in heels.”

— Claire North

84. “To regret your soul is to regret your past.”

— Claire North

85. “His office was an attempt at wood-panelled antiquity that the building could not sustain.”

— Claire North

86. “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

87. “Time is not wisdom; wisdom is not intellect.”

— Claire North

88. “Time, it transpires, is not so good at telling after all.”

— Claire North

89. “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

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

— Claire North

91. “Dozens of lives, centuries of my life, from the first stirring of consciousness in my father’s arms to the day I die, this, Harry, this is my purpose.”

— Claire North

92. “We women of sky and fire, we goddesses, we are so mighty, and yet if we learn anything from old mother Hera, it is that the brighter we blaze, the more the men line up to make us fall.”

— Claire North

93. “The most it ever seems we know how to do with time, is to waste it.”

— Claire North

94. “My first life, for all it lacked any real direction, had about it a kind of happiness, if ignorance is innocence, and loneliness is a separation of care.”

— Claire North

95. “Blackmail is surprisingly difficult to pull off.”

— Claire North

96. “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

97. “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

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

— Claire North

99. “It was a reminder of the old truth that for tyranny to flourish all it required was the complicity of good men.”

— Claire North

100. “Until you have not been free, you cannot understand what freedom means.”

— Claire North