Best 37 quotes of Claire North on MyQuotes

All the bad publicity they brought down on us, yes, it came, and yes, it hurt us—for a day. That’s how long the dirt clung, maybe a bit less. Twitter, Facebook, TV and internet news—you know how long a story stays up on a news website these days, unless it’s about some celebrity scandal? Guess. Go on—guess. Three hours. That’s how much we hurt. And then the world turned, and someone tweeted something new, and everyone retweeted it and moved on, and nothing fucking changes. That’s the world. That’s people power. That’s all it fucking means.

And certainly I know I have the capacity within me to be all of that again, to feel all of that again, and know that, while the door may be currently locked, there is a black pit in the bottom of my soul that has no limit to its falling.

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.

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.

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.

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

Have you ever or are you now involved in espionage or sabotage, or in terrorist activities, or genocide? I think we can put a big yes down for all of the above.

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.

... 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.

In 1789 the French rebelled and found an emperor. The Americans found their freedom from the British and enslaved the Africans. The Arab Spring bloomed and the military and the jihadists seized power. 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.

Is there innocence in ignorance? And if there is, do we tolerate other for their innocence's sake?

Luck is sometimes merciful. The Game never is.

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.

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.

Pilgrimage: to journey to a sacred place. Pilgrim: a traveller or wanderer, a stranger in a foreign place. Crusaders: pilgrims with swords who attempted to conquer the Middle East. Hajj: the journey to Mecca, one of the five pillars of Islam. Shahadah, Salat, Zakat, Sawm, Hajj. Pleasant, perhaps, to say that I am a pilgrim, but looking at it, counting the swirl of white as the devout move round the sacred stone in Mecca, watching the fans scream at the movie premiere, listening to the old men sitting on their benches by the sea who report that everything changes, and that’s okay… fuck me who isn’t a fucking pilgrim anyway?

Q4: Man is no more than the sum of his experience and his capacity to express these experiences to fellow man. Discuss. (500 words) Pg8

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.

...so I'm not going to be good at answering these binary questions, you see. Because sometimes I am so terrified of getting out of bed, because I don't know what the world will bring, or what I'll see. I am terrified because there is so much darkness out there, there is such cruelty, I am terrified when the phone rings that someone will tell me ... someone I love will have died or the world I thought I knew will be gone for ever and I dread it, I dread the day, I dread what it will bring. And sometimes I cannot wait for the sun to rise, because the world is full of people, of human beings singing their songs and telling their stories, of lie and passion, glory and wonder, and Death is not a thing to fear, but is life's mirror reminding us to live, live, live, and I am honoured, I am so honoured, to travel the world and see the world is a place of people, and to be alive with them, living with them, even at the end.

Tell Philip Arnslade that I'm going to blow his fucking brains out. " "Mr. Arnslade will be most relieved.

The first two tracks were pop songs from the 1970s, sung in Danish in a style that was best described as Abba without joy.

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

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?

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

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

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.

Throne of my lonely niche, my wealth, my love, my moonlight. My most sincere friend, my confidant, my very existence, my Sultan, my one and only love. The most beautiful among the beautiful… My springtime, my merry faced love, my daytime, my sweetheart, laughing leaf… My plants, my sweet, my rose, the one only who does not distress me in this world… My Constantinople, my Caraman, the earth of my Anatolia My Badakhshan, my Baghdad and Khorasan My woman of the beautiful hair, my love of the slanted brow, my love of eyes full of mischief… I’ll sing your praises always I, lover of the tormented heart, Muhibbi of the eyes full of tears, I am happy.

Time, it transpires, is not so good at telling after all.

To regret your soul is to regret your past.

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

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

We are fighting for a better land, we are fighting for freedom. We wish only to have hope again in our lives, to have a safe place for our mothers, our children. We wish for justice. We wish for holidays. We wish to go walking in the sea and eat ice cream. We wish for antibiotics when our brothers are sick. We wish for a job that finishes at six o’clock in the afternoon. We wish to pay rent, to cook food with our own hands, good food, to taste cinnamon again. We wish to decorate our homes, and smell fresh paint, and be proud of the lives we have built. We wish to practise our beliefs, piously and in peace. We wish to know our neighbours, and play simple games, and read books, and watch TV. Is this so much? Is this more than any man desires? Do you understand? Pg166

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...

What's the difference between English football and a tea bag? The tea bag stays in the cup longer. What does the cheese say to itself in the morning? Halloumi! pg208

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

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.

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

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....