Touch Quotes

“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, 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, Touch

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

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

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

“Everyone loves a Canadian.”
― Claire North, Touch

“room, laughed in our faces, hitched up her skirts to show us”
― Claire North, Touch

“And who will you be when you come back?” “Someone else. Someone new. Me.”
― Claire North, Touch

“Newark airport specialised in immigration officers whose every scowl seemed to say that, even if they couldn’t stop you entering the United States, they sure as hell weren’t going to make it easy.”
― Claire North, Touch

“All we ever do is pay for other people’s greed and vanity, that’s all we’re good for, men like you and me.”
― Claire North, 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.”
― Claire North, Touch

“Once, in Milan, I was a woman with a handsome face and thick eyebrows that seemed always to rebuke the foolishness of what they beheld.”
― Claire North, Touch

“When the Wall fell, East Berliners had flocked to these hallowed walls of commerce, their priorities clear: smelly soap and soft socks.”
― Claire North, Touch

“My wife hates the things I love, because she hates that I can love anything besides herself,”
― Claire North, Touch

“A few too many beers had settled on my belly, showing as a bulge of muscle and fat competing for which was going to get the final metabolic say.”
― Claire North, Touch

“Janus wore blue, I wore Patterson Wayne, a businessman from Georgia I’d acquired the day after”
― Claire North, Touch

“By day the pedestrianised streets of central Belgrade are swamped with the fashionable come to buy fashionable things, to sustain their sense of fashionability, while on the edge of the city the old folk sit, men with drooping cigarettes and time-sunken eyes, who stare at the swaggering world and are not impressed.”
― Claire North, Touch

“Everyone always respects a guy who’s dealing with personal stuff.”
― Claire North, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, Touch

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