Top 100 Catton Quotes
#1. He wished he were home in Charleston, listening to the Dave Brubeck Quartet on the stereo and reading Bruce Catton.
Dan Simmons
#2. We lived in Indian summer and mistook it for spring.
Bruce Catton
#3. Finally Victoria sighs and says, Julia, I'd be happy if you told me just enough of the facts so I could imagine it. So I could recreate it for myself. So I could imagine that I was really there.
Eleanor Catton
#4. 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
#5. 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.
Eleanor Catton
#6. Teaching is a great complement to writing. It's very social and gets you out of your own head. It's also very optimistic. It renews itself every year - it's a renewable resource.
Eleanor Catton
#7. The storm was borne on greenish winds. It began as a coppery taste in the back of one's mouth, a metallic ache that amplified as the clouds darkened and advanced, and when it struck, it was with the flat hand of a senseless fury.
Eleanor Catton
#8. I think that writers of literary fiction would do well to read more books for children.
Eleanor Catton
#9. 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.
Eleanor Catton
#10. 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
#11. What began as a bitter dispute over Union and States' Rights, ended as a struggle over the meaning of freedom in America. At Gettysburg in 1863, Abraham Lincoln said perhaps more than he knew. The war was about a new birth of freedom.
Bruce Catton
#12. 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
#13. His vanity required constant stimulation, and constant proof that the ongoing creation of his selfhood was a project that he himself controlled.
Eleanor Catton
#14. I'm the rogue Canadian in my family - I just happened to be born here while my parents were studying here.
Eleanor Catton
#15. 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
#16. I think that, in principle, a workshop is such a beautiful idea - an environment in which writers who are collectively apprenticed to the craft of writing can come together in order to collectively improve.
Eleanor Catton
#17. As he watched her sleep he had often been near-choked with joy;
Eleanor Catton
#18. I can feel the public side of my life and the private side of my life sort of drifting away from one another.
Eleanor Catton
#19. If home can't be where you come from, then home is what you make of where you go.
Eleanor Catton
#20. And there is the headlight, shining far down the track, glinting off the steel rails that, like all parallel lines, will meet in infinity, which is after all where this train is going.
Bruce Catton
#21. Each item of business was described in the expansive, flourishing script that Balfour associated in his mind, with a man who could afford to waste his ink on curlicues.
Eleanor Catton
#22. The readership of Victorian novels, when they were published, was much less diverse. People were probably white, and had enough money to be literate. Very often, there are phrases in Italian, German and French that are left untranslated.
Eleanor Catton
#23. 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
#24. All a starred review amounts to is an expression of brand loyalty, an assertion of personal preference for one brand of literature above another. It is as hopelessly beside the point as giving four stars to your mother, three stars to your childhood, or two stars to your cat.
Eleanor Catton
#25. Love cannot be reduced to a catalogue of reasons why, and a catalogue of reasons cannot be put together into love.
Eleanor Catton
#26. 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
#27. You can tell when a writer moves out of a place of struggle and into a place of comfort, and it's always a bad thing.
Eleanor Catton
#28. I would draw a really sharp distinction between creating and producing. I think that they're very different things.
Eleanor Catton
#29. 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
#30. A man ought never to trust another man's evaluation of a third man's disposition.
Eleanor Catton
#31. I wish to be able to call myself deserving of my lot,' Moody said carefully. 'Luck is by nature underserved.
Eleanor Catton
#32. (...) 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. In my experience people are rarely contented to end up where they started.
Eleanor Catton
#36. 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
#37. Gascoigne believed that justice ought to be a synonym for mercy, not an alternative.
Eleanor Catton
#38. History does not usually make real sense until long afterward.
Bruce Catton
#39. My parents took me to the Bronte parsonage in England when I was a teenager. I had a fight with my mum, burst into tears, jumped over a stile and ran out into the moors. It felt very authentic: A moor really is an excellent place to have a temper tantrum.
Eleanor Catton
#40. To learn to get along without, to realize that what the world is going to demand of us may be a good deal more important than what we are entitled to demand of it - this is a hard lesson.
Bruce Catton
#41. Here was the greatest and most moving chapter in American history, a blending of meanness and greatness, an ending and a beginning. It came out of what men were, but it did not go as men had planned.
Bruce Catton
#42. But what you need to understand, my darling," she whispers, "is that this little taste your daughter has had is a taste of what could be. She's swallowed it. It's inside her now.
Eleanor Catton
#43. But time and distance is nothing in the face of true affinity ...
Eleanor Catton
#44. 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!
Eleanor Catton
#45. Such a dividend could only be wasted, for it was borne from waste, and to waste it would return.
Eleanor Catton
#46. Abraham Lincoln was not all brooding and melancholy and patient understanding. There was a hard core in him, and plenty of toughness. He could recognize a revolutionary situation when he saw one, and he could act fast and ruthlessly to meet it.
Bruce Catton
#47. I think that's what fiction writing is actually all about. It's about trying to solve problems in creative ways.
Eleanor Catton
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. A man should not be made to answer for his family.
Eleanor Catton
#51. (How opaque, the minds of absent men and women! And how elusive, motivation!
Eleanor Catton
#52. You give a dog a bad name, and that dog is bad for life.
Eleanor Catton
#53. 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.
Eleanor Catton
#55. I often feel intellectually frustrated when I'm in a position where I'm not moving forward; when I'm not enquiring about something.
Eleanor Catton
#56. Disdain was useful. It gave him a fixed sense of proportion, a rightfulness to which he could appeal, and feel secure.
Eleanor Catton
#57. We spend our entire lives thinking about death. Without that project to divert us, I expect we would all be dreadfully bored. We would have nothing to evade, and nothing to forestall, and nothing to wonder about. Time would have no consequence.
Eleanor Catton
#58. The zodiac is a system a person can play with and see meaning in.
Eleanor Catton
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. I have heard that in the New Zealand native tradition, the soul, when it dies, becomes a star.
Eleanor Catton
#63. 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
#64. Putting one in mind, perpetually, of an untended icebox in which an uncured joint has spoiled.
Eleanor Catton
#65. 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
#66. He spoke as a disappointed man, for whom perfection existed only as something remembered - and then regretted, because it was lost.
Eleanor Catton
#67. He did not enjoy speaking about women with other men, a practice which, in his estimation, was always clownish and braying.
Eleanor Catton
#68. My father is an expatriate American; he fell in love with New Zealand in his youth and never went home.
Eleanor Catton
#69. I believe really strongly in imitation, actually: I think it's the first place you need to go to if you're going to be able to understand how something works. True mimicry is actually quite difficult.
Eleanor Catton
#70. 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
#71. You were apt to go from one extreme to the other, in a truly pious environment; which is why ministers' sons in that day were more less expected to become loose livers when they grew up.
Bruce Catton
#72. 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
#73. The room seemed suddenly to clarify, as when a chance scatter of stars resolves into a constellation before the eye.
Eleanor Catton
#74. 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
#75. The Confederate Constitution was almost identical to that of the United States.
Bruce Catton
#76. Crinoline was so wide that she parted the crowd wherever she walked, leaving an aisle of space behind her.
Eleanor Catton
#77. Te Rau Tauwhare was a man for whom the act of love was the true religion, and the altar of this religion was one in place of which no idols could be made.
Eleanor Catton
#78. 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
#79. Strains of Saturday night filtered in from the street - an
Eleanor Catton
#80. 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.
Eleanor Catton
#81. Like most Rebel soldiers, Sam Watkins owned no slaves.
Bruce Catton
#82. It's very brave going from a position of authority to one where you are an apprentice.
Eleanor Catton
#83. It was a strange thing to behold a whore in mourning - rather like seeing a dandified cleric, or a child with a moustache; it gave one a sense of confusion.
Eleanor Catton
#84. A woman fallen has no future; a man risen has no past.
Eleanor Catton
#85. 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
#86. A little more than he bargained for, perhaps," said Dick Mannering. "It's always that - when it's the truth," replied Balfour.
Eleanor Catton
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. What was a coincidence, Moody thought, but a stilled moment in a sequence that had yet to be explained?
Eleanor Catton
#92. Diligence deserves to be rewarded." "In what proportion? And in what currency? These are empty words.
Eleanor Catton
#93. As an artist, you need to be not at all entitled in your relation with the work. So money is kind of worrying. You can start to expect things if you're used to a certain level of comfort.
Eleanor Catton
#94. 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.
Eleanor Catton
#95. It is a feature of human nature to give what we most wish to receive.
Eleanor Catton
#96. I much prefer a plotted novel to a novel that is really conceptual.
Eleanor Catton
#97. Round here, everybody's always talking about home,' said Balfour. 'Can't help but think that the pleasure's in the missing.
Eleanor Catton
#98. 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
#99. How very lovely she was, with the muted light of the afternoon falling over her shoulder like a veil! How gorgeously the shadow filled that notch beneath her lip!
Eleanor Catton
#100. The 1860 election became a referendum on the southern way of life.
Bruce Catton
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