Top 100 Eleanor Catton Quotes
#1. The illusion of depth in a character is created simply by withholding information from an audience. A character will seem complex and intriguing only if we don't know the reasons why.
Eleanor Catton
#2. The room seemed suddenly to clarify, as when a chance scatter of stars resolves into a constellation before the eye.
Eleanor Catton
#3. Her carriage bespoke an exquisite misery, a wretchedness so perfect and so absolute that it manifested as dignity, as calm. More than a dark horse, she was darkness itself, the cloak of it.
Eleanor Catton
#4. I feel the same about love; that there is a world of difference between the love that one gives - or wants to give - and the love that one desires, or receives.
Eleanor Catton
#5. You give a dog a bad name, and that dog is bad for life.
Eleanor Catton
#6. Man ought never to trust another man's evaluation of a third man's disposition. For human temperament was a volatile compound of perception and circumstance;
Eleanor Catton
#7. I have heard that in the New Zealand native tradition, the soul, when it dies, becomes a star.
Eleanor Catton
#8. 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.
Eleanor Catton
#9. Staines was not a terribly good judge of character. He loved to be enchanted, and so was very often drawn to persons whose manner was suggestive of tragedy, romance, or myth.
Eleanor Catton
#10. It often happens that when a soul under duress is required to attend to a separate difficulty, one that does not concern him in the least, then this second problem works upon the first as a kind of salve.
Eleanor Catton
#11. The zodiac is a system a person can play with and see meaning in.
Eleanor Catton
#13. 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
#14. A lucky man, I've always said, is a man who was lucky once, and after that, he learned a thing or two about investment. Luck only happens once and it's always an accident when it does. (Dick Mannering
19th century New Zealand goldfields magnate)
Eleanor Catton
#15. Round here, everybody's always talking about home,' said Balfour. 'Can't help but think that the pleasure's in the missing.
Eleanor Catton
#16. A trip to the picture framer's, with a selection of prints, is the most joyous outing I can imagine. I've spent more money on framing than on anything else I own.
Eleanor Catton
#17. There are a lot of people of my generation in New Zealand literature, young writers on their first or second books, that I'm just really excited about. There seems to be a big gap between the generation above and us; it seems to be quite radically different in terms of form and approach.
Eleanor Catton
#18. It must have been unpleasant to be discussed as a curiosity, spoken about over breakfast, and between rounds at billiards, as if one's soul were a common property.
Eleanor Catton
#19. A little more than he bargained for, perhaps," said Dick Mannering. "It's always that - when it's the truth," replied Balfour.
Eleanor Catton
#20. 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.
Eleanor Catton
#21. A woman fallen has no future; a man risen has no past.
Eleanor Catton
#22. It's very brave going from a position of authority to one where you are an apprentice.
Eleanor Catton
#23. Her profession did not fascinate him in the least, and he had no boyhood memories of tenderness or embarrassment to soften him toward the subtleties of her trade; when he looked at her, he saw only a catalogue of indiscretions.
Eleanor Catton
#24. We throw at female artists this expectation that their work has to speak to the female experience. And if it doesn't, you're letting the side down. Throwing this stumbling block in the way of female artists is counterintuitive.
Eleanor Catton
#25. His two great loves were hard work and hard work's reward - whiskey, when he could get it, and gin when he could not.
Eleanor Catton
#26. 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.
Eleanor Catton
#27. If home can't be where you come from, then home is what you make of where you go.
Eleanor Catton
#28. I like to think that you receive my words with pleasure but am content with the more probable event that you do not read them at all. In either case writing is a comfort to me and gives shape to my days.
Eleanor Catton
#29. I'm the rogue Canadian in my family - I just happened to be born here while my parents were studying here.
Eleanor Catton
#30. But Lauderback was not the kind of man for whom a sartorial imperfection could lessen the impact of his bearing - in fact, the very opposite was true: the damp suit only made the man look finer.
Eleanor Catton
#31. What I feel is that true creation happens when you're making something out of nothing - like it's divine, you know. Creation is a completely divine concept.
Eleanor Catton
#32. I think that writers of literary fiction would do well to read more books for children.
Eleanor Catton
#33. 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.
Eleanor Catton
#34. (How opaque, the minds of absent men and women! And how elusive, motivation!
Eleanor Catton
#35. A man should not be made to answer for his family.
Eleanor Catton
#36. 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
#37. His temperament was deeply nostalgic, not for 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.
Eleanor Catton
#38. But shame, for Mannering, was an emotion that attended only failure; he could not be made to feel compunction if he had not, in his own estimation, failed.
Eleanor Catton
#39. He ceased to be able to distinguish between personal preference and moral imperative, and he ceased to accept that such a distinction was possible.
Eleanor Catton
#40. They sat in silence for a moment. Then Mannering said, gruffly, 'What you're telling me is that this isn't the whole picture.
'Luck is never the whole picture' said Staines.
Eleanor Catton
#41. (...) there is no truth except truth in relation, and heavenly relation is composed of wheels in motion, tilting axes, turning dials; it is a clockwork orchestration that alters every minute, never repeating, never still.
Eleanor Catton
#42. I wish to be able to call myself deserving of my lot,' Moody said carefully. 'Luck is by nature underserved.
Eleanor Catton
#43. 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
#44. 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
Eleanor Catton
#45. 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.
Eleanor Catton
#46. When I was writing 'The Luminaries,' I read a lot of crime novels because I wanted to figure out which ones made me go, 'Ah! I didn't know that was coming!'
Eleanor Catton
#47. I vote far-left. I am frequently angered by corporate greed and think education ought to be free and teachers paid well.
Eleanor Catton
#48. As might be expected, he was given to bouts of very purposeful ignorance, and tended to pass over the harsher truths of human nature in favor of those that could be romanticized by whimsy and imagination.
Eleanor Catton
#49. Unconfirmed suspicion tends, over time, to become willful, fallacious, and prey to the vicissitudes of mood - it acquires all the qualities of common superstition - and
Eleanor Catton
#50. Astrology's a moving system that depends on where you're looking at it from on Earth. My horoscope here in London would be completely different to down in New Zealand.
Eleanor Catton
#51. Any description of a person that comes from the outside is very hard to deal with. People don't like being summarised. It's nice to receive a compliment, but it makes me feel a bit uncomfortable.
Eleanor Catton
#52. For he was still unable to recall the apparition wholly to his own mind, much less to form a narrative for the pleasures of a third.
Eleanor Catton
#55. 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.
Eleanor Catton
#56. he gained a real pleasure in befriending a man whom he privately had cause to despise, for he liked very much the feeling that his regard for others was a private font, a well, that he could muddy, or drink from, at his own discreet pleasure, and on his own time.
Eleanor Catton
#57. Margaret Atwood was the author who took me out of children's literature and guided me towards adult literature.
Eleanor Catton
#58. It's dreadful to feel alone and really be alone. But
Eleanor Catton
#59. You miss the old country. Of course you do. But you don't go back.
Eleanor Catton
#60. I don't see that my age has anything to do with what is between the covers of my book, any more than the fact that I am right-handed. It's a fact of my biography, but it's uninteresting.
Eleanor Catton
#61. I take your point; it's this twilight that's the danger, between the old world and the new.
Eleanor Catton
#62. 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.
Eleanor Catton
#63. For human temperament was a volatile compound of perception and circumstance; Moody saw now that he could no more have
Eleanor Catton
#64. Crosbie teach you a bit of English, Ted?" "I taught him," said Tauwhare. "I taught him korero Maori! You say Thomas - I say Tamati. You say Crosbie - I say korero mai!
Eleanor Catton
#65. Writing is exhilarating, but reading reviews is not. I've been really devastated by 'good' reviews because they misunderstand the project of the book. It can be strangely galvanising to get a 'bad' one.
Eleanor Catton
#66. The first blush of love, when the self has lost its mooring, and, half-drowning, succumbs to a fearful tide.
Eleanor Catton
#67. 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;
Eleanor Catton
#68. I am interested in those truths that are yet unknown, it is only so that they might in time, be made known- or to put it more plainly, so that in time I might come to know them." P 502
Eleanor Catton
#69. 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
#70. He had always been irreproachable in his conduct, and as a consequence, his capacity for empathy was small.
Eleanor Catton
#71. He spoke loudly, declaring his ambitions and opinions with a frankness that might be called hubristic (if one was skeptical) or dauntless (if one was not).
Eleanor Catton
#72. 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.
Eleanor Catton
#73. He wondered what assumptions she was forming, what picture was emerging from this scant constellation of his life.
Eleanor Catton
#74. As the conjugal act cannot be spoken of aloud for reasons both sacred and profane, the ritual of the pipe was, for the pair of them, a holy ritual that was unspeakable and mortified, just as it was ecstatic and divine: its sacredness lay in its very profanity, and its profanity, in its sacred form.
Eleanor Catton
#75. A homeward-bounder is a chance for total reinvention, Mr. Nilssen," he said at last. "Find a nugget, and a man can buy his own life. That kind of promise isn't offered in the civil world.
Eleanor Catton
#76. I have always loved reading books for children and young adults, particularly when those books are mysteries.
Eleanor Catton
#77. 'The Luminaries' is such a different book to 'The Rehearsal.' There are only a couple of things that link the two books: there's a certain preoccupation with looking at relationships from the outside, being shut out of human intimacy; and then there's patterning.
Eleanor Catton
#78. Often I listen to songs on repeat for days and days at a time. There's something hypnotic or meditative, and it mirrors the way that I am putting the sentence together, going back over the same phrases again and again.
Eleanor Catton
#79. Never underestimate how extraordinarily difficult it is to understand a situation from another person's point of view.
Eleanor Catton
#80. 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
#81. Months of silence had made him very bitter, and his bitterness had ripened, in an instant, into spite.
Eleanor Catton
#82. It is always a starkly private moment when a governor first apprehends his subject as a man - perhaps not as an equal, but at least as a being, irreducible, possessed of frailties, enthusiasms, a real past, and an uncertain future.
Eleanor Catton
#83. At high school they expect answers, but at university all you're supposed to do is dispute the wording of the question.
Eleanor Catton
#84. In researching 'The Luminaries,' I did read quite a lot of 20th-century crime. My favourites out of that were James M. Cain, Dassiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Graham Greene and Patricia Highsmith.
Eleanor Catton
#85. Land could not be minted! Land could only be lived upon, and loved.
Eleanor Catton
#86. In improvising, you've got your scale; you've got the notes that are going to sound good with other notes, the intervals that are going to sound good. But you've also got all the chromatic possibilities, the possibilities of sounding dissident, of being unexpected.
Eleanor Catton
#87. Moody had left all discerning faculties in the pitching belly of the barque Godspeed. He wanted only shelter, and solitude.
Eleanor Catton
#88. From the very beginning, I had an ambition for 'The Luminaries': a direction - but not a real idea.
Eleanor Catton
#89. 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.
Eleanor Catton
#90. 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
#91. As she rises, she will have to reconcile herself." "Reconcile - ?" "The savage and the civil,
Eleanor Catton
#92. Reason is no match for desire: when desire is purely and powerfully felt, it becomes a kind of reason of its own.
Eleanor Catton
#93. There's no such thing as innocence any more," the girl said, "there's only ignorance. You think you are holding on to something pure, but you aren't. You're just ignorant. You are handicapped by everything you don't yet know.
Eleanor Catton
#95. I feel - as though a new chamber of my heart has opened." "Listen.
Eleanor Catton
#96. Why, it almost makes one forgive the rain, does it not - when the sun comes out like this, at the end of it all.
Eleanor Catton
#97. Loneliness cannot be reassured by proportion. Even friendship would have seemed to Pritchard a feast behind a pane of glass; even the smallest charity would have wet his lip, and left him wanting.
Eleanor Catton
#98. He built his persona as a shield around his person, because he knew very well how little his person could withstand.
Eleanor Catton
#99. He had conceded in a panic - for it crushed Nilssen's spirit to be held in low esteem by other men. He could not bear to know that he was disliked, for to him there was no real difference between being disliked, and being dislikeable; every injury he sustained was an injury to his very selfhood.
Eleanor Catton
#100. When the lights go out, the parents cry and ask each other what did he do to her, but the girls are burning with a question of their own: what did she do? What does she know now that makes her so dangerous, like the slow amber leak of a noxious fume?
Eleanor Catton
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