Top 120 Claire North Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “However the gods move in our lives, good sister, let us not imagine they move for any whims save their own.”

— Claire North

102. “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

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

— Claire North

104. “I look back at my life and tell myself that the choices I made were the only ones that could be made, the only thing to be done. This is true, of course. It is also a lie. There were words spoken that could have been expressed some other way. There were secrets held. Judgements made. I cannot change them now. I run through my memories again and again, and every time they grow more distorted, the truth vanishing into fantasy.”

— Claire North

105. “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

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

— Claire North

107. “For though they were not sung, it was the mothers, the daughters and the wives who kept the world turning, the fires lit, the lights burning.”

— Claire North

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

— Claire North

109. “This is the way with grief. With guilt. With regret. All we can do is honour the lessons this brings, look honestly upon who we were and what we have done, and try to do better when the next sun rises.”

— Claire North

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

— Claire North

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

— Claire North

112. “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

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

— Claire North

114. “Grief never leaves, but life layers itself on top of the pain.”

— Claire North

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

— Claire North

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

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

— Claire North

120. “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

121. “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

122. “Either live with that fire in your heart, or die in shrivelled, blackened grief. No one will forgive you. No forgiveness will ever be enough. And no one but you can make your actions the apology that the dead are owed. Repent and live – and stop asking the dead to take the pain away. They cannot. You will live with it, and that is all.”

— Claire North

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

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

— Claire North