Eleanor Catton Quotes

The nice thing about the zodiac as a system is it is quite comprehensive as a range of impulses and psychological states it can speak about.

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

I take your point; it's this twilight that's the danger, between the old world and the new.

How silently the world revolved, when one was brooding, and alone.

An interesting thing about New Zealand, you know, literature is that it really didn't begin in any real sense until the 20th century.

Is the prestige conferred by the Man Booker prize for the book or me? I would prefer it on the book and for me to be treated ordinarily.

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

I much prefer a plotted novel to a novel that is really conceptual.

His nature was not a suspicious one, and he did not take pleasure, as some men did, in believing himself to have been betrayed.

One looks in mirrors to have one's arrogance confirmed.

If a man wants any shot at making his fortune then he'll never sign his name to any piece of paper that he didn't write himself. P 553

You give a dog a bad name, and that dog is bad for life.

No one can protect a soul against themselves - against their own hand, you know!

I think that writers of literary fiction would do well to read more books for children.

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.

I have always considered that there is a great deal of difference between keeping one's own secret, and keeping a secret for another soul;

A secret always has a strengthening effect upon a newborn friendship, as does the shared impression that an external figure is to blame:

Sometimes I'll read something on Twitter, and I'll just be in the darkest of moods for the rest of the day or the rest of the week sometimes.

I would draw a really sharp distinction between creating and producing. I think that they're very different things.

I have always loved reading books for children and young adults, particularly when those books are mysteries.

It's dreadful to feel alone and really be alone. But

Deprecation always waits to be disputed, and, if the disputation does not come, becomes petulance.

A little more than he bargained for, perhaps," said Dick Mannering. "It's always that - when it's the truth," replied Balfour.

He wondered what assumptions she was forming, what picture was emerging from this scant constellation of his life.

I have written ever since I knew mechanically how to do it.

As he watched her sleep he had often been near-choked with joy;

If home can't be where you come from, then home is what you make of where you go.

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

Round here, everybody's always talking about home,' said Balfour. 'Can't help but think that the pleasure's in the missing.

I think that you have to keep the reader front and centre if you're going to write something that people are going to love and be entertained by.

All men want their whores to be unhappy.

He spoke as a disappointed man, for whom perfection existed only as something remembered - and then regretted, because it was lost.

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

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

Shepard's theory of law had roused his intelligence, and gratified it, and he again felt master of his faculties.

He ceased to be able to distinguish between personal preference and moral imperative, and he ceased to accept that such a distinction was possible.

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

What was a coincidence, Moody thought, but a stilled moment in a sequence that had yet to be explained?

Crinoline was so wide that she parted the crowd wherever she walked, leaving an aisle of space behind her.

Long historical books get written by women, but not contemporary experiments, which still seems to be a very male-dominated field.

Moody had left all discerning faculties in the pitching belly of the barque Godspeed. He wanted only shelter, and solitude.

I've had countless reviews sort that have made me cry. It's funny, it doesn't ever get better either; you can't turn your ears off.

For human temperament was a volatile compound of perception and circumstance; Moody saw now that he could no more have

Such a dividend could only be wasted, for it was borne from waste, and to waste it would return.

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

like a disaffected swan -

Putting one in mind, perpetually, of an untended icebox in which an uncured joint has spoiled.

I can feel the public side of my life and the private side of my life sort of drifting away from one another.

His vanity required constant stimulation, and constant proof that the ongoing creation of his selfhood was a project that he himself controlled.

In my experience people are rarely contented to end up where they started.

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

I think that's what fiction writing is actually all about. It's about trying to solve problems in creative ways.

A man ought never to trust another man's evaluation of a third man's disposition.

Worked like a Trojan. That's one thing I'll say for the Chinese: when it comes to pure old-fashioned work, you can't fault them.

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.

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

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

He was indulgent toward the open spaces of other men's futures, but he was impatient with the shuttered quarters of their pasts.

I often feel intellectually frustrated when I'm in a position where I'm not moving forward; when I'm not enquiring about something.

Money doesn't transform a person - the only thing that can is love.

A man should not be made to answer for his family.

His two great loves were hard work and hard work's reward - whiskey, when he could get it, and gin when he could not.

His own mortality held only an intellectual fascination for him, a dry luster; and, having no religion, he did not believe in ghosts.

I am a New Zealander, but I don't want to swallow New Zealand identity in one gulp.

Solitude is a condition best enjoyed in company.

Would you call it lucky to stay, or lucky to go?"
"I'd call it lucky to choose", said Moody.

The room seemed suddenly to clarify, as when a chance scatter of stars resolves into a constellation before the eye.

The frontier I think makes brothers of us all

(How opaque, the minds of absent men and women! And how elusive, motivation!

There was a computer in our garage when I was growing up, and I'd go out there in winter and wrap myself in a blanket and write a story.

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

Money is a burden, a burden most keenly felt by the poor.

He built his persona as a shield around his person, because he knew very well how little his person could withstand.

The ability of humans to read meaning into patterns is the most defining characteristic we have.

Strains of Saturday night filtered in from the street - an

Months of silence had made him very bitter, and his bitterness had ripened, in an instant, into spite.

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

I feel - as though a new chamber of my heart has opened." "Listen.

He had known instinctively that it was always better to tell a partial truth with a willing aspect than to tell a perfect truth in a defensive way.

The past rolls forward to touch the present hour.

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

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

I loved 'Middlemarch,' I think that's one of my favourite books of all time, actually.

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

The zodiac is a system a person can play with and see meaning in.

She was tried for trying to take her own life," Gascoigne said. "There's a symmetry in that, do you not think? Tried for trying.

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

At high school they expect answers, but at university all you're supposed to do is dispute the wording of the question.

As she rises, she will have to reconcile herself." "Reconcile - ?" "The savage and the civil,

Why, it almost makes one forgive the rain, does it not - when the sun comes out like this, at the end of it all.

Gascoigne believed that justice ought to be a synonym for mercy, not an alternative.

Luck is never the whole picture,

.. a string of coincidence is not a coincitence.

a chance for total reinvention,

Diligence deserves to be rewarded." "In what proportion? And in what currency? These are empty words.

You can't tell from looking at a man what he's capable of doing. And you certainly can't tell what he's done.

My father is an expatriate American; he fell in love with New Zealand in his youth and never went home.

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

It is less fun to talk about what I am feeling rather than what I am thinking. Saying 'I feel awesome' isn't really interesting or enquiring.

Margaret Atwood was the author who took me out of children's literature and guided me towards adult literature.