Quotes from Touch

Claire North ·  426 pages

Rating: (7.2K votes)


“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, quote from Touch


“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, quote from Touch


“Consequences are only for the ones who stay behind.”
― Claire North, quote from Touch


“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, quote from Touch


“People always find difficult truths harder than easy lies.”
― Claire North, quote from Touch



“insecurity is often the mother of aggression.”
― Claire North, quote from Touch


“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, quote from Touch


“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, quote from Touch


“In the land of the free you are free to say whatever you want, regardless of whether you have anything to say.”
― Claire North, quote from Touch


“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, quote from Touch



“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, quote from Touch


“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....”
― Claire North, quote from Touch


“You say ‘love’ too easily, Kepler."
“No, not really–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-splendoured thing, as the old song says.”
― Claire North, quote from Touch


“Have you ever been or are you now involved in espionage or sabotage, or in terrorist activities, or in genocide? I think we can put a big yes down for all of the above.”
“You planning on ratting me out to the US authorities?”
“I thought about it for a fanciful moment,” I replied, pushing the travel documents back across the desk. “I also thought about walking you through the ‘something to declare’ aisle singing the North Korean national anthem, but I doubted anyone would find it funny.”
― Claire North, quote from Touch


“We were bringing in a suspect, a possible ghost. Marigare decided the witness was compromised. We were supposed to…” he rolled the words slowly around his mouth, like the taste of aniseed that won’t wash away “… eliminate the threat.”
― Claire North, quote from Touch



“I hate LA. Endless straight lines from nowhere particular to nothing much especially. Even”
― Claire North, quote from Touch


“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.”
― Claire North, quote from Touch


“Their fear is the fear of the funfair ride where reason tells you the seat belt will keep you safe. 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, quote from Touch


“It is my belief that the process of getting drunk is a cushion to the actual reality of being drunk. Bit by bit the mind grows accustomed to swaying room, burning skin, churning stomach, so though every aspect of your physiology screams, poison, poison, it is the gentle and pleasant acquisition of the state that prevents the experience from becoming a thoroughly vile event. Jumping”
― Claire North, quote from Touch


About the author

Claire North
Born place: in The United Kingdom
Born date April 27, 1986
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Popular quotes

“Никто не в силах захватить и присвоить себе раскат грома. Никто не может отобрать небеса у другого человека. Никто не может забрать небо с собой при расставании.”
― Luis Sepúlveda, quote from The Old Man Who Read Love Stories


“Scopique leaned in close. “Lord Scabrous.” “What about him?” “If he is abducting students for his own purposes,” Scopique said, “then someone needs to find out who might be next.”
― Joe Schreiber, quote from Red Harvest


“War, famine, disease, genocide. Death, in a million different forms, often painful and protracted for the poor individual wretches involved. What god would so arrange the universe to predispose its creations to experience such suffering, or be the cause of it in others? What master of simulations or arbitrator of a game would set up the initial conditions to the same pitiless effect? God or programmer, the charge would be the same: that of near-infinitely sadistic cruelty; deliberate, premeditated barbarism on an unspeakably horrific scale.”

Hyrlis looked expectantly at them. “You see?” he said. “By this reasoning we must, after all, be at the most base level of reality – or at the most exalted, however one wishes to look at it. Just as reality can blithely exhibit the most absurd coincidences that no credible fiction could convince us of, so only reality – produced, ultimately, by matter in the raw – can be so unthinkingly cruel. Nothing able to think, nothing able to comprehend culpability, justice or morality could encompass such purposefully invoked savagery without representing the absolute definition of evil. It is that unthinkingness that saves us. And condemns us, too, of course; we are as a result our own moral agents, and there is no escape from that responsibility, no appeal to a higher power that might be said to have artificially constrained or directed us.”
― Iain M. Banks, quote from Matter


“The man who has faith in logic is always cuckolded by reality.”
― Alexander Theroux, quote from Darconville’s Cat


“Such nights are possible, and we survive them. It is a matter of sleeping next to the adored body you no longer have the right or inclination to love. Whether you are the one who casts off, or are the cast of yourself; whether your arms are the recoilers, or the ones that reach wantingly, then pull back, remembering they are no longer wanted. Two bodies that are used to each other's rhythms and sleep sounds, that know the turnings and breathings, know not to worry about that cough or that brief garbled grunt, that wildly flung arm or that stone-cold foot. Bodies that soon will not know each other's night selves: will touch each other through jackets and jeans and the cooled-down air of reestablished acquaintance, if such a thing is possible between a given pair of ex-lovers.”
― Sylvia Brownrigg, quote from Pages for You


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