Claire North Quotes

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.

I just want to be myself,' she murmured.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

We all knew, of course. Everyone knows, but no one looks. We don't look because if we look it makes us evil because we aren't doing something about it, or it makes us sad because we can't do anything about it, or it proves that we're monsters when we always thought we were righteous because we won't do anything about it. Either way, safer not to look.

What is the point of you?
The world is ending.
Now it's up to you.

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.

You say 'love' too easily, Kepler."
"No, not rally - please don't call me that. The idea that love has to be a blazing romantic thing of monogamous stability is innately ludicrous. You loved your parents, perhaps, because they were the warmth you could flee to. You loved your first childhood crush with a passion that made your lips tingle, your flesh grow light in their presence. You loved your wife with the steadiness of an ocean against the shore; your lover with the blaze of a shooting star, your best friend with the confidence of a mountain. Love is a many-splendorous thing, as the old song says....

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.

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

But I have seen many men for whom death truly is the end walk towards their demise for reasons no greater than that it was what they were told to do. On the beaches of Normandy, where the bodies floated in the water beside the falling ramps of the landing craft, I saw men run into machine-gun fire who would say, "Hell, I never thought it would come to this, but now I'm here, what's a guy to do?" With no going back, and no going forward, they went to their deaths with no better plan immediately to hand, having gambled that their choices would not narrow so far, and having been found to be wrong.

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.

The press, the media, the internet - they'll make the noise, make the screaming, the screaming all the time, and the truth and my voice will be lost. The blaming and the noise, human things, they'll make it about human things, not the truth. How can anyone live with it? How can anyone live with so much screaming in their lives, all the time?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I have lead a thoroughly despicable life. Or rather... not despicable. My evils have been ordinary evils. My sins against the world are daily, little sins that no one would question. I am a normal man. I am a normal man, and have done no wrong, and there is a place in hell waiting for me.

He who is silent is seen to consent.

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

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?

There is an art to navigating London during the Blitz. Certain guides are obvious: Bethnal Green and Balham Undergrounds are no-goes, as is most of Wapping, Silvertown and the Isle of Dogs. The further west you go, the more you can move around late at night in reasonable confidence of not being hit, but should you pass an area which you feel sure was a council estate when you last checked in the 1970s, that is usually a sign that you should steer clear.
There are also three practical ways in which the Blitz impacts on the general functioning of life in the city. The first is mundane: streets blocked, services suspended, hospitals overwhelmed, firefighters exhausted, policemen belligerent and bread difficult to find. Queuing becomes a tedious essential, and if you are a young nun not in uniform, sooner or later you will find yourself in the line for your weekly portion of meat, to be eaten very slowly one mouthful at a time, while non-judgemental ladies quietly judge you Secondly there is the slow erosion-a rather more subtle but perhaps more potent assault on the spirit It begins perhaps subtly, the half-seen glance down a shattered street where the survivors of a night which killed their kin sit dull and numb on the crooked remnants of their bed. Perhaps it need not even be a human stimulus: perhaps the sight of a child's nightdress hanging off a chimney pot, after it was thrown up only to float straight back down from the blast, is enough to stir something in your soul

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.

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

you do not need the world to tell you what to be. Especially if the world tells you that you are never good enough.

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

It's just money," he replied. "It's just paper."
"It's time," I said, sharper than I'd meant. "It's the means to purchase time. It's the cost of a new bed in a hospital, a solar panel on a roof; it's a year's salary for a tailor in Dhaka, it's the price of a fishing boat, the cost of an education, it's not money. It's what it could have been.

Hqve you never heard of priests proclaim that the meek will inherit the earth and wondered if kings of old didn't smile to hear it? Your reward comes after death. Nirvana. The wheel of life turns and we are elevated from animals to women, from women to men, from men to kings, from kings to gods, from gods to... perfection. And what is perfection now? Not crucifixion, not poverty endured patiently on the mountaintop. No--the perfect life is to have an annual salary of £120,000, an Aston Martin, a £1.6million-pound home, a wife, two children and at least two foreign holidays a year. Perfection is an idol built upon oppression. Perfection is the heaven that kept the masses suppressed; the promise of a future life that quells rebellion. Perfection is the self-hatred an overweight woman feels when she sees a slim model on TV; perfection is the resentment the well-paid man experiences when he beholds a miserable billionaire. Perfection kills. Perfection destroys the soul.

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

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.

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

I was six years old. I was seven hundred and fifty. I was being hunted.

Your face is your fortune! Don't spend it all at once!

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.

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.

Words are made by history, we build them and they change meaning through time, but the music they play...

Sophia: Go with it?
Harry: Don't fight against inevitability. Life is until it is not, so why get fussed? Don't hurt anyone, try not to give your dinner guests food poisoning, be clean in word and deed-what else is there? Just be a decent person in a decent world.
Sophia: Everyone's a decent person in their own eyes.

To regret your soul is to regret your past.

Series of cysts on his kidneys and liver which induced the septicaemia

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.

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.

She was crying, silently, holding my arm, crying. I let her cry a while, held her close, felt her snot and tears on my shoulder, wanted to cry myself, why is that, when I hear a child cry on the train it makes me sad, see a stranger weep and feel tears come to my eyes, a weakness, perhaps, a place where emotion hasn't become accustomed to the extremities of feeling.

You must choose the life you live at the time you live it.

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.

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.

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.

After a night of drinking, she would be a pale, starling-sized creature, but now, in this place, she is moonlight in heels.

People always find difficult truths harder than easy lies.

He had a Kalashnikov, the universal weapon of all budget warriors,

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?

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.

Words, rolling on. Sometimes the Harbinger of Death hears these words, words of house prices and commutes and the price of pasta and the new washing machine and the difficulty of finding a place to dry your wet clothes, and they make him indescribably sad.

Tonight, for some reason, as he listens to a story of a life still being built, and speaks of the ending of all things, he is not afraid, and this world, which seemed to be only ashes, begins again to give him an extraordinary joy.

...the only way to be free from the fear of surveillance is to be absolutely harmless

We all die. We don't have to live our lives fearing it.

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

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.

There is no loss, if you cannot remember what you have lost.

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.

Levity and sincerity are not antonyms. We take pleasure in playing chess, but that does not mean we make wasteful moves. You

The most it ever seems we know how to do with time, is to waste it.

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.

One day people will just say what they mean, and business will be conducted properly.
Pg401

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.

Blackmail is surprisingly difficult to pull off.

Insecurity is often the mother of aggression.

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.

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.

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.

When you have seen the whole world, the old words said, there is always Greenland left.

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.

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.

Reason is dead." Death shrugged. "Was

We've met before - a thousand times. I am the girl the world forgets. It started when I was sixteen years old. A slow declining, an isolation, one piece at a time. A father forgetting to drive me to school. A mother setting the table for three, not four. A teacher who forgets to chase my missing homework. A friend who looks straight through me and sees a stranger. No matter what I do, the words I say, the people I hurt, the crimes I commit - you will never remember who I am. That makes my life tricky. It also makes me dangerous...

When you are alone, even the quiet is full of monsters

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.

Everyone loves a Canadian.

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.

What is knowledge?
It is inspiration. It is a call to battle. It is a reminder that there is nothing which cannot be achieved. It is humanity in all its forms, in my heart.

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

Knowledge is not a substitute for ingenuity, merely an accelerant.

Always so very courteous. Lose courtesy, and you lose control; lose control and you lose yourself.

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.

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.

We have no kin but each other, for our loves to our mothers and our wives demand that we protect them from what we know. 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. In them we must find our meaning. In them we must hold to hope.

There is a black pit in the bottom of my soul that has no limit to its falling.

For progress, we have eaten our souls up, and nothing matters anymore.

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.

Forgive me," I wrote at the bottom. "I did not think I would break.

I find that the only way I can survive is in the present tense. If I look at my past, I see loneliness. Loneliness and… and mistakes made of loneliness. If I look at my future, I see fear. Struggle. The possibility of much pain. And so I look only at now, at this present tense, and ask myself, what am I doing now? Who am I now?

This thing you carry inside you, I don't know what it is. I don't know where you got it. But Harry, the past is the past. You are alive today. That is all that matters. You must remember, because it is who you are, but as it is who you are, you must never, ever regret. To regret your past is to regret your soul.