Top 100 Claire North Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “Men must be decent first and brilliant later, otherwise you’re not helping people, just servicing the machine.”

— Claire North

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

— Claire North

57. “Time is not wisdom; wisdom is not intellect. I am still capable of being overwhelmed; he overwhelmed me. “May.”

— Claire North

58. “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

59. “The internet gave us all the power of speech, and what did we discover? That victory goes to he who shouts the loudest, and that reason does not sell.”

— Claire North

60. “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

61. “Scared is how you see the spear coming for your eye. Scared is how you choose where and when to strike.”

— 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. “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

64. “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

65. “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

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

— Claire North

67. “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

68. “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

69. “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

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

— Claire North

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

— Claire North

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

— Claire North

73. “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

74. “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

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

— Claire North

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

— Claire North

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

— Claire North

78. “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

79. “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

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

— Claire North

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

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

— Claire North

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

— Claire North

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

— Claire North

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

— Claire North

88. “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

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

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

— Claire North

93. “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

94. “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

95. “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

96. “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

97. “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

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

— Claire North

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

— Claire North

100. “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