Eleanor Catton quotes are thought-provoking, memorable and inspiring. From views on society and politics to thoughts on love and life, Eleanor Catton has a lot to say. In this list we present the 24 best Eleanor Catton quotes, in no particular order. Let yourself get inspired!
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Eleanor Catton quotes
Love cannot be reduced to a catalogue of reasons why, and a catalogue of reasons cannot be put together into love.
— Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries
for Pop, who sees the starsand Jude, who hears their music
— Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries
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.
— Eleanor Catton
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.
— Eleanor Catton, The Rehearsal
But could he endure it, that other men knew her in a way that he, Staines, did not? He did not know.
— Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries
He liked lonely places, because he never really felt alone.
— Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries
Suffering, he thought later, could rob a man of his empathy, could turn him selfish, could make him depreciate all other sufferers.
— Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries
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.
— Eleanor Catton
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.
— Eleanor Catton, The Rehearsal
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.
— Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries
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.
— Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries
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 t
— Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries
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.
— Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries
Let’s just enjoy it for ourselves. Dawn is such a private hour, don’t you think? Such a solitary hour. One always hears that said of midnight, but I think of midnight as remarkably companionable—everyone together, sleeping in the dark.”I am afraid I am interrupting your solitude, ‘ Anna
— Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries
Solitude is a condition best enjoyed in company.
— Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries
She is a loner, too bright for the slutty girls and too savage for the bright girls, haunting the edges and corners of the school like a sullen disillusioned ghost
— Eleanor Catton, The Rehearsal
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.
— Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries
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.
— Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries
I wish to be able to call myself deserving of my lot, ‘ Moody said carefully. ‘Luck is by nature underserved.
— Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries
Pritchard was lonely, and like most lonely souls, he saw happy couples everywhere.
— Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries
What an unrequited love it is, this thirst! But is it love, when it is unrequited?
— Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries
I would make up silver lies studded with shards of perfect detail like mosaic splinters, sharp and everlasting, the kind of tiny faultless detail that would make them all sure that what I said was true. I would have alibis. I would bring in other people and teach them a story, and rehearse it so carefully and for so long that soon they’d all start to believe that what they said was actually true.
— Eleanor Catton, The Rehearsal
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.
— Eleanor Catton
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.
— Eleanor Catton
Fiction is supposed to be immersive and supposed to be entertaining and narrative, so structures have to be buried a little bit. If they come foregrounded too much, it stops being fiction and starts being poetry – something more concrete and out of time.
— Eleanor Catton
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