Claire North

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

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

“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.”

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

“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....”

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

“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.”

“... 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.”

“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...”

“A funeral procession, the women scream until they fall down in a faint, the men hold them up, the boys cry silently sand swear to take up arms in their father's name. It is the same funeral procession that their fathers saw, their fathers before them, and their grandfathers unto generations unknown, where the same vow was taken.”

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

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

“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.”

“[We] need people who are kind by instinct, not by effort. But that is what we lack in this time. For progress, we have eaten our souls up, and nothing matters anymore.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”