Top 100 Claire North Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Ours is the fellowship of strangers who know a secret that we cannot express. We are both of us broken, shattered, hollow and alone. Only for the ones we love do we remain, painted dolls in the playhouse of this life.”

— Claire North

52. “You are under no compulsion to do any of this to me. It’s an entirely voluntary action on your part.” “Everybody breaks, Harry.” “I know. But you can’t afford to see how long it takes me, can you? So come on, Vincent,” I relished his English name, rolled it round my tongue. “You’d better get started.” He hesitated, just a moment, then the begging was gone. His eyes tightened.”

— Claire North

53. “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

54. “You do not fix grief; there is no pill. You only wait, and be there, and let time pass.”

— Claire North

55. “Death flies because it is the modern way of things but doesn’t particularly enjoy it, except for occasionally, when he rides up front with the pilot.”

— Claire North

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

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

— Claire North

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

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

— Claire North

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

— Claire North

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

— Claire North

69. “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

70. “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

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

— Claire North

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

— Claire North

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

— Claire North

74. “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

75. “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

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

— Claire North

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

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

— Claire North

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

— Claire North

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

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

— Claire North

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

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

— Claire North

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

— Claire North

94. “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

95. “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

96. “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

97. “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

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

— Claire North

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

— Claire North

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

— Claire North