Best 55 quotes of Eleanor Catton on MyQuotes

A woman fallen has no future; a man risen has no past.

For although a man is judged by his actions, by what he has said and done, a man judges himself by what he is willing to do, by what he might have said, or might have done—a judgment that is necessarily hampered, not only by the scope and limits of his imagination, but by the ever-changing measure of his doubt and self-esteem.

I have observed that male writers tend to get asked what they think and women what they feel," she says. "In my experience, and that of a lot of other women writers, all of the questions coming at them from interviewers tend to be about how lucky they are to be where they are – about luck and identity and how the idea struck them. The interviews much more seldom engage with the woman as a serious thinker, a philosopher, as a person with preoccupations that are going to sustain them for their lifetime.

I really wanted to write an adventure story, a murder-mystery that was set during the gold-rush years in New Zealand.

I see disappointment as something small and aggregate rather than something unified or great. With a little effort, every failure can be turned into something good.

I think the adverb is a much-maligned part of speech. Its always accused of being oppressive, even tyrannical, when in fact its so supple and sly.

It is a feature of human nature to give what we most wish to receive.

It is a mark of the depth of their wounding that they are pretending they suspected it all along. Everything that they have seen and been told about love so far has been an inside perspective, and they are not prepared for the crashing weight of this exclusion. It dawns on them now how much they never saw and how little they were wanted, and with this dawning comes a painful re-imagining of the self as peripheral, uninvited, and utterly minor.

I vote far-left. I am frequently angered by corporate greed and think education ought to be free and teachers paid well.

Love cannot be reduced to a catalogue of reasons why, and a catalogue of reasons cannot be put together into love.

Never underestimate how extraordinarily difficult it is to understand a situation from another person's point of view.

Reason is no match for desire: when desire is purely and powerfully felt, it becomes a kind of reason of its own.

Remember that anybody who is clever enough to set you free is clever enough to enslave you.

Solitude is a condition best enjoyed in company.

Theatre is a concentrate of life as normal. Theatre is a purified version of real life, an extraction, an essence of human behaviour that is stranger and more tragic and more perfect than everything that is ordinary about me and you.

The proper way to understand any social system was to view it from above.

The way that I see astrology is as a repository of thought and psychology. A system we've created as a culture as way to make things mean things.

To experience sublime natural beauty is to confront the total inadequacy of language to describe what you see. Words cannot convey the scale of a view that is so stunning it is felt.

What’s the likelihood? That the one girl who makes my heart race is the one girl who wants me in return? That the accident of my attraction coincides with the accident of hers?

Are you fixing to stay in this country, then, Walter? After you've dug yourself a patch, and made yourself a pile?' 'I expect my luck will decide that question for me.' 'Would you call it lucky to stay, or lucky to go?' 'I'd call it lucky to choose,' said Moody—surprising himself, for that was not the answer he would have given, three months prior.

But could he endure it, that other men knew her in a way that he, Staines, did not? He did not know.

Cowell Devlin sighed. Yes, he understood Anna Wetherell at long last, but it was not a happy understanding. Devlin had known many women of poor prospects and limited means, whose only transport out of the miserable cage of their unhappy circumstance was the flight of the fantastic. Such fantasies were invariably magical—angelic patronage, invitations into paradise—and Anna's story, touching though it was, showed the same strain of the impossible. Why, it was painfully clear! The most eligible bachelor of Anna's acquaintance possessed a love so deep and pure that all respective differences between them were rendered immaterial? He was not dead—he was only missing? He was sending her 'messages' that proved the depth of his love—and these were messages that only she could hear? It was a fantasy, Devlin thought. It was a fantasy of the girl's own devising. The boy could only be dead.

For Gascoigne and Clinch were not so dissimilar in temperament, and even in their differences, showed a harmony of sorts - with Gascoigne as the upper octave, the clearer, brighter sound, and Clinch as the bass-note, thrumming.

for Pop, who sees the stars and Jude, who hears their music

Has he made an avowal of his love?' 'No,' Anna said. 'He doesn't need to. I know it, just the same.

He and Anna lay facing each other, Staines lying on his left hip, and Anna, on her right, both of them with their knees drawn up to their chests, Staines with one hand tucked beneath his bandaged shoulder, Anna with one hand tucked beneath her cheek. She must have turned toward him, some time in the night: her left arm was flung outward, her fingers reaching, her palm turned down... Devlin came closer...He looked down at Anna and Emery, their mirrored bodies, facing in. They were breathing in tandem. So they are lovers, he thought, looking down at them. So they are lovers, after all. He knew it from the way that they were sleeping.

He liked lonely places, because he never really felt alone.

How would I overlook the name Moody? Why, that's like overlooking Hanover, or—or Plantagenet.' The woman laughed. 'I would hardly compare Adrian Moody to a royal line!

...and the hermit's spirit detaches itself, ever so gently, and begins its lonely passage upward, to find its final resting place among the stars.

...Emery Staines, lost to meditation, doubts his own intentions, his natural frankness having accepted very readily the fact of his desire, and the fact of his delight, and the ease with which his pleasure might be got, expressions that cause him no shame, but that nevertheless give him pause, for he feels, whatever the difference in their respective stations, a certain bond with Anna Wetherell, a connexion, by virtue of which he feels less, rather than more, complete, in the sense that her nature, being both oppositional to and in accord with his own, seems to illumine those internal aspects of his character that his external manner does not or cannot betray, leaving him feeling both halved and doubled, or in other words, doubled when in her presence, and halved when out of it, and as a consequence he becomes suddenly doubtful of those qualities of frankness and good-natured curiosity upon which he might ordinarily have acted, without doubt and without delay; these meditations being interrupted, frequently, by a remark of Joseph Pritchard's —'if it weren't for her debt, her dependency, she'd have had a dozen propositions from a dozen men'—that keeps returning, uncomfortably and without variation, to his mind.

If I have learned one thing from experience, it is this: never underestimate how extraordinarily difficult it is to understand a situation from another person's point of view.

I have heard that in the New Zealand native tradition, the soul, when it dies, becomes a star.

In his person Gascoigne showed a curious amalgam of classes, high and low. He had cultivated his mind with the same grave discipline with which he now maintained his toilette—which is to say, according to a method that was sophisticated, but somewhat out of date. He held the kind of passion for books and learning that only comes when one has pursued an education on one’s very own—but it was a passion that, because its origins were both private and virtuous, tended towards piety and scorn. His temperament was deeply nostalgic, not for his own past, but for past ages; he was cynical of the present, fearful of the future, and profoundly regretful of the world’s decay. As a whole, he put one in mind of a well-preserved old gentleman (in fact he was only thirty-four) in a period of comfortable, but perceptible, decline—a decline of which he was well aware, and which either amused him or turned him melancholy, depending on his moods.

Is it the smoke?' the boy said, shivering slightly. 'I've never touched the stuff, myself, but how it claws at one...like a thorn in every one of your fingers, and a string around your heart...and one fees it always. Nagging. Nagging.

It is not yet a feeling that points her in a direction. It is just the feeling of a vacuum, a void waiting to be filled.

It is perfectly serendipitous,' said the boy, descending the steps to the street. 'Fancy that—us meeting a second time! Of course I have wished for it, very much—but they were vain wishes; the kind one makes in twilight states, you know, idly. I remember just what you said, as we rounded the heads of the harbor—in the dawn light. "I should like to see him in a storm," you said. I have thought of it many times, since; it was the most delightfully original of speeches.' Anna blushed at this: not only had she never heard herself described as an original before, she had certainly never supposed that her utterances qualified as 'speeches.

It's not vague,' Anna said. 'I'm certain of it. Just as when you're certain you did have a dream...you knew you dreamed...but you can't remember any of the details.

I’ve been looking at all the ordinary staples of flirting," says Julia, "like biting your lip and looking away just a second too late, and laughing a lot and finding every excuse to touch, light fingertips on a forearm or a thigh that emphasize and punctuate the laughter. I’ve been thinking about what a comfort these things are, these textbook methods, precisely because they need no decoding, no translation. Once, a long time ago, you could probably bite your lip and it would mean, I am almost overcome with desiring you. Now you bite your lip and it means, I want you to see that I am almost overcome with desiring you, so I am using the plainest and most universally accepted symbol I can think of to make you see. Now it means, Both of us know the implications of my biting my lip, and what I am trying to say. We are speaking a language, you and I together, a language that we did not invent, a language that is not unique to our uttering. We are speaking someone else’s lines. It’s a comfort.

I wish to be able to call myself deserving of my lot,' Moody said carefully. 'Luck is by nature underserved.

Pritchard was lonely, and like most lonely souls, he saw happy couples everywhere.

She gave a shiver, and suddenly clutched her arms about her body. She spoke, Gascoigne thought, with an exhilarated fatigue, the kind that comes after the first blush of love, when the self has lost its mooring, and, half-drowning, succumbs to a fearful tide. But addiction was not love; it could not be love. Gascoigne could not romanticize the purple shadows underneath her eyes, her wasted limbs, the dreamy disorientation with which she spoke; but even so, he thought, it was uncanny that opium's ruin could mirror love's raptures with such fidelity.

Suffering, he thought later, could rob a man of his empathy, could turn him selfish, could make him depreciate all other sufferers.

The saxophone does not speak that language. The saxophone speaks the language of the underground, the jaded melancholy of the half-light—grimy and sexy and sweaty and hard. It is the language of orphans and bastards and whores.

The saxophone is the cocaine of the woodwind family, the sax teacher continues. Saxophonists are admired because they are dangerous, because they have explored a darker, more sinister side of themselves.

Tonight shall be the very beginning.' 'Was it?' 'It shall be. For me.' 'My beginning was the albatrosses.' 'That is a good beginning; I am glad it is yours. Tonight shall be mine.' 'Ought we to have different ones?' 'Different beginnings? I think we must.' 'Will there be more of them?' 'A great many more. Are your eyes closed?' 'Yes. Are yours?' 'Yes. Though it's so dark it hardly makes a difference.' 'I feel—more than myself.' 'I feel—as though a new chamber of my heart has opened.' 'Listen.' 'What is it?' 'The rain.

Virginity is a myth, by the way. There is no on-off switch, no point of return. It's just a first experience, like any other. Everything surrounding it, all the lights and curtains and special effects- that's just part of the myth.

We observe that one of the great attributes of discretion is that it can mask ignorance of all the most common and lowly varieties, and Walter Moody was nothing if not excessively discreet.

We were talking nonsense, and I said something silly about unrequited love, and he became very serious, and he stopped me, and he said that unrequited love was not possible; that it was not love. He said that love must be freely given, and freely taken, such that the lovers, in joining, make equal halves of something whole.

What an unrequited love it is, this thirst! But is it love, when it is unrequited?

What was glimpsed in Aquarius—what was envisioned, believed in, prophesied, predicted, doubted, and forewarned—is made, in Pisces, manifest. Those solitary visions that, but a month ago, belonged only to the dreamer, will now acquire the form and substance of the real. We were of our own making, and we shall be our own end. And after Pisces? Out of the womb, the bloody birth. We do not follow: we cannot cross from last to first. Aries will not admit a collective point of view, and Taurus will not relinquish the subjective. Gemini's code is an exclusive one. Cancer seeks a source, Leo, a purpose, and Virgo, a design; but these are projects undertaken singly. Only in the zodiac's second act will we begin to show ourselves: in Libra, as a notion, in Scorpio, as a quality, and in Sagittarius, as a voice. In Capricorn we will gain memory, and in Aquarius, vision; it is only in Pisces, the last and oldest of the zodiacal signs, that we acquire a kind of selfhood, something whole. But the doubled fish of Pisces, that mirrored womb of self and self-awareness, is an ourobouros of mind—both the will of fate, and the fated will—and the house of self-undoing is a prison built by prisoners, airless, door-less, and mortared from within. These alterations come upon us irrevocably, as the hands of the clock-face come upon the hour.