Top 92 Claire North Quotes

#1. There is no greater isolation a man may experience than to be lonely in a crowd.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #93
#2. Men must be decent first and brilliant later, otherwise you're not helping people, just servicing the machine.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #49069
#3. 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

Claire North Quotes #66216
#4. It was a reminder of the old truth that for tyranny to flourish all it required was the complicity of good men.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #81977
#5. For a second, my hand touched yours, but that second is gone, and cannot be seen, heard or felt ever again. This second is gone, too, the moment in which I spoke by your side. It is dead. Let it die.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #173964
#6. 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.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #236519
#7. I was six years old. I was seven hundred and fifty. I was being hunted.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #253814
#8. There is no loss, if you cannot remember what you have lost.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #283896
#9. The roads weren't much to speak of, and the car's suspension had been welded in by a stonemason resentful of his change in career.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #296655
#10. 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

Claire North Quotes #311791
#11. Until you have not been free, you cannot understand what freedom means.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #314701
#12. People always find difficult truths harder than easy lies.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #339812
#13. 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

Claire North Quotes #362411
#14. Your face is your fortune! Don't spend it all at once!

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #369103
#15. He who is silent is seen to consent.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #375504
#16. What is the point of you?
The world is ending.
Now it's up to you.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #398433
#17. 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

Claire North Quotes #399795
#18. She smiled and understood my meaning without it needing to be said. She leaned in close and murmured in my ear, 'The world is ending, as it always must. But the end of the world is getting faster.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #438581
#19. Consequences are only for the ones who stay behind.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #450146
#20. I just want to be myself,' she murmured.

'But is that good enough?' Leena mused, 'Or is it just selfish?

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #453450
#21. Death, as has been established, holds little fear - it is but the flesh. The mind is the source of what we are, and it was the mind that they were determined to destroy.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #486232
#22. How the fuck do I know that my better is anything more than the great big fat lie we tell ourselves to justify the slow fat nothing of our days.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #512196
#23. Are you God, Dr August? Are you the only living creature that matters? Do you think, because you remember it, that your pain is bigger and more important? Do you think, because you experience it, that your life is the only life that gets counted?

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #518605
#24. To regret your soul is to regret your past.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #521160
#25. When we die it is as if the world resets, and only memory remains as evidence of the deeds we have done, no more and no less.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #521645
#26. You know why the experts don't have an easy answer? Because a fucking expert's the guy who knows how complicated the fucking questions are.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #537278
#27. Time, it transpires, is not so good at telling after all.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #538369
#28. Levity and sincerity are not antonyms. We take pleasure in playing chess, but that does not mean we make wasteful moves. You

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #548425
#29. Everyone loves a Canadian.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #555440
#30. 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

Claire North Quotes #588216
#31. 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

Claire North Quotes #590361
#32. 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

Claire North Quotes #600680
#33. Complexity should be your excuse for inaction.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #633840
#34. 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

Claire North Quotes #724320
#35. 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

Claire North Quotes #747457
#36. They are ...
in their own, unspectacular way, to which no ballads are written or songs sung, in a domestic, daily, life-being-lived way,
... happy

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #769816
#37. Forgive me," I wrote at the bottom. "I did not think I would break.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #793268
#38. The world is boiled down to aphorisms and fairy tales.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #826251
#39. Perhaps, I suggested, the fate of the universe could briefly take second place to the thorny issue of graduating with honours?
He blew loudly between his lips, a liquid sound of contempt. "That," he exclaimed, "is precisely what's wrong with academics.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #888826
#40. Marcus Aurelius, AD 121-180, author of Meditations. Quoth said emperor: It is not death a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live. And also: You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realise this, and you will find strength.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #897118
#41. But there is another question, more important, which is what is the first game that I was ever played in. That game began, I think, long before I ever competed for the higher league, and though I have not yet seen its shape, its battle is still ongoing.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #898678
#42. You are an aspect of the first breath that made the universe, your body is made of the dust of bodies that have gone before, and when you die, your body and your deeds give life.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #909687
#43. I locked my smile in the attack position,

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #921277
#44. Ours is the fellowship of strangers who know a secret that we cannot express.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #922050
#45. 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

Claire North Quotes #922265
#46. Series of cysts on his kidneys and liver which induced the septicaemia

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #987295
#47. 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

Claire North Quotes #995656
#48. 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

Claire North Quotes #1004021
#49. People are just people, doing people things. Sometimes they're stupid, and sometimes they're desperate, and a lot of the time it's just bad luck. Don't get your knickers in a twist over people.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1036629
#50. Luck is sometimes merciful. The Game never is.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1059185
#51. There is no loneliness more lonely than to be alone in a crowd. No awkwardness more unsettling than the inside joke you do not comprehend.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1069804
#52. It is said that there are three stages of life for those of us who live our lives in circles. These are rejection, exploration, and acceptance.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1074303
#53. 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

Claire North Quotes #1080976
#54. 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

Claire North Quotes #1081386
#55. Time is not wisdom; wisdom is not intellect. I am still capable of being overwhelmed; he overwhelmed me. May

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1095193
#56. For progress, we have eaten our souls up, and nothing matters anymore.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1125792
#57. You must choose the life you live at the time you live it.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1130638
#58. If Pietrok-111 was a one-horse town, Pietrok-112 was the glue factory where that horse went to die.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1175568
#59. I have no time for boiled sausages, or boiled vegetables of any nature really, and cannot for the life of me comprehend why anyone would still insist on serving dishes whose whole cooking process consisted of exposure to water, to freely invited guests.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1181746
#60. When you have seen the whole world, the old words said, there is always Greenland left.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1203927
#61. only ice against which they can whisper, and who has any joy in scheming against winter herself? All

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1257842
#62. The most it ever seems we know how to do with time, is to waste it.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1259420
#63. 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

Claire North Quotes #1267312
#64. You should learn to live a little, rough it out-I'm telling you, there's no greater high.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1342609
#65. My ma was all of them at some time, and what she learned is that the best way to talk to God is by yourself.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1350463
#66. Insecurity is often the mother of aggression.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1354031
#67. Is there innocence in ignorance? And if there is, do we tolerate other for their innocence's sake?

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1361626
#68. What if thought is not free? What if memory is a prison, society a lie? Sometimes I look around and all I hear is screaming, screaming, screaming - what if you are the enlightened one?

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1372284
#69. There is a black pit in the bottom of my soul that has no limit to its falling.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1388598
#70. Single-minded dedication to just one thing, without rest, respite or distraction, is only conducive to migraines, not productivity.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1437013
#71. The trick with a truly successful intimidation is not to rely on volume or obscenity, but to cultivate that quiet certainty which informs any listener that your people will do the shouting for you, should the moment come.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1443887
#72. When you are alone, even the quiet is full of monsters

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1478901
#73. 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

Claire North Quotes #1498121
#74. I hate marmalade." "I like it," I retorted. "I could eat pots of the stuff." He straightened a little, turned to fully examine me. "Are you ... threatening me with breakfast condiments?

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1499451
#75. What is the purpose of history? It seeds only hate. All the history books should be burnt, so that we are no longer the peoples of our lands, but merely peoples...

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1502845
#76. The coin turns; where it falls, nobody knows.
The coin turns, empires rise and empires fall, men live and men die, babies scream and dead men sigh; the world changes but people are always and are never the same.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1503491
#77. I know now that there is something dead inside me though I cannot remember exactly when it died.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1516698
#78. We are no more and no less than minds, and it is human for the mind to be imperfect and to forget.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1526170
#79. In the end, he turned the radio on, and fell asleep to the sounds of either country or Western - he could never work out which was which.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1546777
#80. We all die. We don't have to live our lives fearing it.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1592318
#81. Reason is dead." Death shrugged. "Was

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1617071
#82. True fear is the fear of doubt; it is the mind that will not sleep, the open space at your back where the murderer stands with the axe. It is the gasp of a shadow passed whose cause you cannot see, the laughter of a stranger whose laugh, you know, laughs at you.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1647935
#83. I hate LA. Endless straight lines from nowhere particular to nothing much especially. Even

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1719382
#84. Blackmail is surprisingly difficult to pull off.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1734891
#85. In the land of the free you are free to say whatever you want, regardless of whether you have anything to say

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1740237
#86. 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

Claire North Quotes #1742843
#87. I have waited for this day, and grief faded with time.
Or did it? Perhaps grief never leaves us but is merely drowned out by a flood of life overwhelming it. Perhaps the wound that bled once is bleeding still, and I did not notice it until now.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1779480
#88. Wow, that is so deep.'
He meant it, of course.
'You're really real,' he added breathily. 'Say something else.'
I decided he wasn't worth punching, and walked away.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1795856
#89. Always so very courteous. Lose courtesy, and you lose control; lose control and you lose yourself.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1811715
#90. He had a Kalashnikov, the universal weapon of all budget warriors,

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1813080
#91. Knowledge is not a substitute for ingenuity, merely an accelerant.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1823455
#92. As a young man, I used to sport a rather ragged beard [ ... ]; it doesn't suit and in its untended state I can often come to look like a set of sensory organs lost in a raspberry bush.

Claire North

Claire North Quotes #1867220

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