Pursuit of William Abbey Quotes

“We live in ignorance most of the time. We make up stories to find sense, to make the thunder the wrath of a dancing devil, to make the sunrise about our lives, a gift to us, rather than just the turning of the world that turns regardless of whether we live and die. We tell ourselves stories to put ourselves at the centre of everything, and invent knowledge to prove this, and truths to justify why we are important, and one day I thought… damn, maybe I am a great Buddhist after all! Because if I have learnt anything from my brother-in-law’s ghost, it’s that the world we see when we are trying to understand ourselves is nothing compared to the world we see when we simply let ourselves look. Truth… is imperceptible to human eyes, because we are so caught up in being ourselves that we are never simply here, seeing, here, being, here. We desire truth, the story that makes us right, I think, more than anything we have ever known. It is nonsense. It is noise. Let it go.”
― Claire North, Pursuit of William Abbey

“And then the shadow passes, and I know nothing any more. Conviction fades, and I’m left behind, wondering what I believe, when everyone else is gone.”
― Claire North, The Pursuit of William Abbey

“He was a connoisseur of strange happenings, and swore blind that he had once met a man who he then immediately and entirely forgot (I could not see how he could be so convinced of this), and a woman who claimed that she knew the future because she had lived it a hundred times already. In France there was one who had gambled the love of her child on a secret game, another who moved between the mortal bodies of men like air, and one who swore that cities generated a power that the wise could manipulate to achieve miracles.”
― Claire North, The Pursuit of William Abbey

“Perhaps you don’t hate the British,” I mused. “Perhaps it is simply injustice.” “Of course!” she tutted, not turning her head from her examination of the road before us. “Of course it is injustice! But when injustice wears the same pasty face, you make connections, no? It is not truth. It is simply how the heart works.”
― Claire North, The Pursuit of William Abbey

“I do not think there was any place in her heart for hate that night. Hate comes after, when the grieving is done.”
― Claire North, The Pursuit of William Abbey

“The rain, when it burst, pushed all other sound away, filling the night with water on stone, water on soil, water on furry leaf, water dripping off needle and spine, on metal pipe and tapping on dirty glass. I put my hands out beneath the reach of the tree and listened to water on skin, and wondered who I would be when I went home.”
― Claire North, The Pursuit of William Abbey

“In Ireland, a man is imprisoned for writing incendiary literature, and while in prison he is tortured, and when he leaves he kills a man, seeing no other way, and having no other dignity. That man’s son grows up to hate the idea that killed his father, and so he kills another whose child will one day grow up to kill, and all things considered, the constabulary’s policy of beating men bloody to clean up the blood is somewhat flawed.”
― Claire North, The Pursuit of William Abbey

“I do not know whether death is mercy, or love is easy, or vengeance is peace, or if all these things are lies, or truth, or if it is the truest thing of all to say that life is all of these, all of these truths together, in perfect contradiction, blinding us to a greater truth that lies beneath.”
― Claire North, The Pursuit of William Abbey

“Sometimes I remind them about women too, but they say we shouldn’t be unrealistic with our ambitions. Some of them are rich boys playing at being poor because it makes them feel moral. Some are poor men who found Engels when God stopped answering their prayers. A few are thieves and crooks. One is an agent of the Russians, sent to sow discord;”
― Claire North, The Pursuit of William Abbey