Top 100 Claire North Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “Only for the ones we love do we remain, painted dolls in the playhouse of this life.”

— Claire North

52. “All men want to be someone else. It’s what makes them do greater things with their lives. With the lives they can live.”

— Claire North

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

— Claire North

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

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

— Claire North

58. “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

59. “I do not think a pilgrimage is a proper pilgrimage if you are also using it as an excuse to visit your favourite aunt, or buy silk cheaply to re-sell,” she murmured sombrely. “That’s just business dressed up in orange robes.”

— Claire North

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

— Claire North

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

— Claire North

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

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

— Claire North

67. “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

68. “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

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

— Claire North

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

— Claire North

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

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

— Claire North

76. “And then the shadow passes, and I know nothing any more. Conviction fades, and I’m left behind, wondering what I believe, when everyone else is gone.”

— Claire North

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

80. “Tell me, in a world where wealth is power, and power is the only freedom, what would desperate men not do to be heard?” “Civil.”

— Claire North

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

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

— Claire North

85. “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

86. “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

87. “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

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

— Claire North

89. “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

90. “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

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

— Claire North

92. “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

93. “We are no more and no less than minds, and it is human for the mind to be imperfect and to forget.”

— Claire North

94. “There was no moment of life, no waking from a darkness to find myself cured in that place. Rather there was slow shuffling towards comprehension, a few hours of recollection follow by a sleep, followed by a waking which stayed awake a little longer.”

— Claire North

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

— Claire North

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

— Claire North

97. “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

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

— Claire North

99. “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

100. “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