Eleanor Catton Quotes

#1. A lucky man ... is a man who was lucky once, and after that, he learned a thing or two about investment. p 553 #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#2. He wondered what assumptions she was forming, what picture was emerging from this scant constellation of his life. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#3. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#4. Gascoigne believed that justice ought to be a synonym for mercy, not an alternative. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#5. Never underestimate how extraordinarily difficult it is to understand a situation from another person's point of view. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#6. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#7. What was a coincidence, Moody thought, but a stilled moment in a sequence that had yet to be explained? #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#8. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#9. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#10. I loved 'Middlemarch,' I think that's one of my favourite books of all time, actually. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#11. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#12. 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; #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#13. One looks in mirrors to have one's arrogance confirmed. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#14. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#15. (...) 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#16. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#17. I had never read Victorian novels before going overseas. I read a handful of authors, but I had not immersed myself in the literature of the 19th century. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#18. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#19. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#20. The first blush of love, when the self has lost its mooring, and, half-drowning, succumbs to a fearful tide. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#21. You want Mr. Staines to love you very much, don't you, Miss Wetherell?'
Anna seemed offended by his implication. 'He does love me.'
'That wasn't my question.'
She squinted at him. 'Everyone wants to be loved.'
'That's very true,' Devlin said, sadly. 'We all want to be loved - and need to be loved, I think. Without love, we cannot be ourselves. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#22. I highlight everything I find interesting, and then type out everything I've highlighted, and then print out everything I've typed, and reread these printed notes as often as possible. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#23. He presented himself in the manner of a discreet and quick-minded butler, and as a consequence was often drawn into the confidence of the least voluble of men, or invited to broker relations between people he had only lately met. He had, in short, an appearance that betrayed very little about his own character, and an appearance that others were immediately inclined to trust. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#24. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#25. 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) #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#26. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#27. I think that writers of literary fiction would do well to read more books for children. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#28. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#29. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#30. I think it's more optimistic about human nature to acknowledge that people are the products of their time but then to see that they have moments of grace and dignity that everybody has. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

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

#32. In a court of law,' he said at last 'a witness takes his oath to speak the truth: his own truth, that is. He agrees to two parameters. His testimony must be the whole truth, and his testimony must be nothing but the truth. Only the second of these parameters is a true limit. The first, of course, is largely a matter of discretion. When we say the whole truth we mean, more precisely, all the facts and impressions that are pertinent to the matter at hand. All that is impertinent is not only immaterial; it is, in many cases, deliberately misleading. Gentlemen, [...] I contend that there are no whole truths, there are only pertinent truths----and pertinence, you must agree, is always a matter of perspective. I do not believe that any of you has perjured himself in any way tonight. I trust that you have given me the truth, and nothing but the truth. But your perspectives are very many, and you will forgive me if I do not take your tale for something whole. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#33. All men want their whores to be unhappy. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#34. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

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

#36. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#37. But could he endure it, that other men knew her in a way that he, Staines, did not? He did not know. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#38. As he watched her sleep he had often been near-choked with joy; #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#39. I'm a Libra. I'm happy to be an air sign, but I do think I have a little too much air in my chart as a whole - some more water would be useful, especially in my personal life, as an emotional counterweight to all that abstraction. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#40. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#41. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#42. We think it sufficient to say, at this juncture, that there were eight passengers aboard the Godspeed when she pulled out of the harbour at Dunedin, and by the time the barque landed on the Coast, there were nine. The ninth was not a baby, born in transit; nor was he a stowaway; nor did the ship's lookout spot him adrift in the water, clinging to some scrap of wreckage, and give the shout to draw him in. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#43. I think that success is dangerous because it can make people feel too comfortable; it can lull them into thinking that they have achieved mastery and don't need to be curious anymore. But failure can also do that: it can function as a kind of inverse achievement, where you feel you've achieved the opposite of mastery, and you give up. Right #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#44. It is a feature of human nature to give what we most wish to receive. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#45. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#46. 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 said. "No, no," the boy said. "Oh, no. Solitude is a condition best enjoyed in company." He grinned at her, quickly, and Anna smiled back. "Especially the company of one other soul," he added, turning back to the sea. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#47. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#48. Well,' said Staines, frowning slightly, 'that's very difficult to say - which to value higher. Honesty or loyalty. From a certain point of view one might say that honesty is a kind of loyalty - loyalty to the truth ... though one would hardly call loyalty a kind of honesty! I suppose that when it came down to it - if I had to choose between being dishonest but loyal, or being disloyal but honest - I'd rather stand by my men, or by my country, or by my family, than by truth. So I suppose I'd say loyalty ... I myself. But in others ... in the case of others, I feel quite differently. I'd much prefer an honest friend to a friend who was merely loyal to me; and I'd much rather be loyal to an honest friend than to a sycophant. Let's say that my answer is conditional; in myself, I value loyalty; on others, honesty #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#49. A man with no memory was a man with no foresight - to #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#50. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#51. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#52. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#53. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#54. He spoke as a disappointed man, for whom perfection existed only as something remembered - and then regretted, because it was lost. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#55. From the very beginning, I had an ambition for 'The Luminaries': a direction - but not a real idea. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#56. Putting one in mind, perpetually, of an untended icebox in which an uncured joint has spoiled. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#57. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#58. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#59. Such a dividend could only be wasted, for it was borne from waste, and to waste it would return. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#60. The frontier I think makes brothers of us all #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#61. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#62. Why, it almost makes one forgive the rain, does it not - when the sun comes out like this, at the end of it all. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#63. There are so many ways of posturing that people associate with being a writer. They imagine you wearing a beret and drinking only red wine and being full of yourself, and so, for a long time, the way I felt about writing was too private. I felt it too important and didn't want to be teased about it. So I lied about it. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#64. He formed convictions as other men formed dependencies - a belief for him was as a thirst - and he fed his own convictions with all the erotic fervor of the willingly confirmed. This rapture extended to his self-regard. Whenever the subterranean waters of his mind were disturbed, he plunged inward, and struggled downward - kicking strongly, purposefully, as if he wished to touch the mineral depths of his own dark fantasies; as if he wished to drown. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

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

#66. 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 #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#67. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#68. In my experience people are rarely contented to end up where they started. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#69. As she rises, she will have to reconcile herself." "Reconcile - ?" "The savage and the civil, #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#70. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#71. (How opaque, the minds of absent men and women! And how elusive, motivation! #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#72. This girl is good at voices. She actually wanted to be Isolde, because Isolde has a better part and this girl is pale and stringy and rumpled and always looks slightly alarmed, which are qualities that don't quite fit Isolde, and so she plays Bridget instead. In truth it is her longing to be an Isolde that most characterises her as a Bridget: Bridget is always wanting to be somebody else. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#73. 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). #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#74. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#75. The others, but he failed to catch anybody's eye. He coughed, adding, "I suppose I've dreamed of what comes afterward - that is, what the gold might lead to, what it might become." The man seemed pleased by this answer. "Reverse alchemy, is what I like to call it," he said, "the whole business, I mean - prospecting. Reverse alchemy. Do you see - the transformation - not into gold, but out of it - #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#76. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#77. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#78. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#79. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#80. His two great loves were hard work and hard work's reward - whiskey, when he could get it, and gin when he could not. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#81. like a disaffected swan - #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#82. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#83. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#84. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#85. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#86. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#87. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#88. That's a private interest of mine – what brings a fellow down here, you know, to the ends of the earth – what sparks a man? #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#89. Suffering, he thought later, could rob a man of his empathy, could turn him selfish, could make him depreciate all other sufferers. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#90. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

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

#92. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#93. Clinch's efforts in love were always of a mothering sort, for it is a feature of human nature to give what we most wish to receive, and it was a mother that Edgar Clinch most craved - his own having died in his infancy, and since then been resurrected as a goddess of shining virtue in his mind, a goddess whose face was as a blurred shape, seen through a window on a night of fog. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#94. There was something cold and hard about the man, Nilssen thought - diverting his own ill feeling, as he often did, into a principle of aesthetic distaste. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#95. The zodiac is a system a person can play with and see meaning in. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#96. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

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

#98. He did not enjoy speaking about women with other men, a practice which, in his estimation, was always clownish and braying. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#99. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#100. Strains of Saturday night filtered in from the street - an #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#101. The room seemed suddenly to clarify, as when a chance scatter of stars resolves into a constellation before the eye. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#102. The challenge that I set for myself was to see whether or not plot and structure could coexist, and why it was that we had to always privilege one above the other. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#103. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#104. In my experience the most forceful and aggressive mothers are always the least inspired, the most unmusical of souls, all of them profoundly unsuccessful women who wear their daughter's image on their breast like a medal, like a bright deflection from their own unshining selves. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#105. I have always loved reading books for children and young adults, particularly when those books are mysteries. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#106. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#107. I am trying to decide between the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,' he said presently. 'I am afraid my history is such that I can't manage both at once.

'Hi - no need for the truth at all,' said Paddy Ryan. 'Who said anything about the truth? You're a free man in this country, Walter Moody. You tell me any old rubbish you like, and if you string it out until we reach the junction at Kunara, then I shall count it as a very fine tale. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#108. Months of silence had made him very bitter, and his bitterness had ripened, in an instant, into spite. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#109. 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; #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#110. Money is a burden, a burden most keenly felt by the poor. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#111. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#112. His vanity required constant stimulation, and constant proof that the ongoing creation of his selfhood was a project that he himself controlled. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#113. The white scar on his cheek was slightly puckered at one end, as when a seamstress leaves the needle in the fabric, before she quits for the day; this phantom needle lay just beyond the edge of his mouth, and seemed to tug it upward, as if trying to coax his stern expression - unsuccessfully - into a smile. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#114. I grew up on the South Island of New Zealand, in a city chosen and beloved by my parents for its proximity to the mountains - Christchurch is two hours distant from the worn saddle of Arthur's Pass, the mountain village that was and is my father's spiritual touchstone, his chapel and cathedral in the wild. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#115. Some folk are dealt a bad hand. But you can't rely on another person's conscience to live the life you want to live. You make do with what you're given; you struggle on. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#116. If home can't be where you come from, then home is what you make of where you go. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#117. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#118. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#119. Remember that these years of your daughters life are only the rehearsal for everything that comes after. Remember that its in her best interests to slip up now, while she's still safe in the green room ... Dont wait until she's out in the savage white light of the floods, where everyone can see. Let her practice everything in a safe environment, with a helmet and kneepads and packed lunches, and you at the end of the hall with the door cracked open in case anyone cries out in the long hours of the night. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#120. Luck is never the whole picture, #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#121. Te Rau Tauwhare was not quite thirty years of age. He was handsomely muscular, and carried himself with assurance and the tightly wound energy of youth; though not openly prideful, he never showed that he was impressed or intimidated by any other man. He possessed a deeply private arrogance, a bedrock of self-certainty that needed neither proof nor explication - for although he had a warrior's reputation, and an honorable standing within his tribe, his self-conception had not been shaped by his achievements. He simply knew that his beauty and his strength were without compare; he simply knew that he was better than most other men. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#122. I much prefer a plotted novel to a novel that is really conceptual. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#123. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#124. ...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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#125. Round here, everybody's always talking about home,' said Balfour. 'Can't help but think that the pleasure's in the missing. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#126. I think that's what fiction writing is actually all about. It's about trying to solve problems in creative ways. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#127. Deprecation always waits to be disputed, and, if the disputation does not come, becomes petulance. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#128. Heavy ships are so graceful in the water' Anna said at last, looking away. 'Compared to lighter crafts, I mean. If a boat is too light - if it bobs about on the waves - there's no grace to its motion. I believe that it's the same with birds. Large birds are not buffeted about by the wind. They always look so regal on the air. This fellow. Seeing him fly is like seeing a heavy ship cut through a wave. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#129. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#130. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#131. for Pop, who sees the stars
and Jude, who hears their music #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#132. A man should not be made to answer for his family. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#133. 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 #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#134. He was not surly by temperment, and in fact did not find it difficult to form friendships, nor to allow those friendships to deepen, once they had been formed; he simply preferred to answer to himself. He disliked all burdens of responsibility, most especially when those responsibilities were expected, or enforced
and friendship nearly always devolved into matters of debt, guilt, and expectation. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

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

#136. I don't feel like literature has the power to alienate. I think that's something people feel if they don't connect with a work of art. But I don't think a work of art can actively reject the person who's looking at it or reading it. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

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

#138. a chance for total reinvention, #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#139. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#140. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#141. .. a string of coincidence is not a coincitence. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#142. My father is an expatriate American; he fell in love with New Zealand in his youth and never went home. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#143. How roundly self-examination is condemned, by the moral prophets of our age! As if the self had no relation to the self, and one only looked in mirrors to have one's arrogance confirmed; as if the act of self-regarding was not as subtle, fraught and ever-changing as any bond between twin souls. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#144. Gaining control isn't the exciting part. Sleeping with a minor isn't exciting because you get to boss them around. It's exciting because you're risking so much. And taking a risk is exciting because of the possibility that you might lose, not the possibility that you might win. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#145. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#146. Money doesn't transform a person - the only thing that can is love. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#147. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#148. Prayers often begin as memories. When we remember those whom we have loved, and miss them, naturally we hope for their safety and their happiness, wherever they might be. That hope turns into a wish, and whenever a wish is voiced, even silently, even without words, it becomes a supplication. Perhaps we don't know to whom we're speaking; perhaps we ask before we truly know who's listening, or before we even believe that listener exists. But I judge it a very fine beginning, to make a practice of remembering those people we have loved. When we remember others fondly, we wish them health and happiness and all good things. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#149. Diligence deserves to be rewarded." "In what proportion? And in what currency? These are empty words. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#150. My sense of injustice about our family's 'weirdness' in not owning a car was amplified by the fact that we did not own a television, either - my parents were unapologetic about this and told me very cheerfully that I would thank them for it when I was older, which was quite true. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#151. WHEN A RESTLESS spirit is commissioned, under influence, to solve a riddle for another man, his energies are, at first, readily and faithfully applied. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#152. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#153. Crinoline was so wide that she parted the crowd wherever she walked, leaving an aisle of space behind her. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#154. Margaret Atwood was the author who took me out of children's literature and guided me towards adult literature. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#155. The difference between duty that is dreaded and duty that comes from love. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#156. 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! #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#157. Shepard's theory of law had roused his intelligence, and gratified it, and he again felt master of his faculties. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#158. 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 #Quote by Eleanor Catton

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

#160. How silently the world revolved, when one was brooding, and alone. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#161. Love cannot be reduced to a catalogue of reasons why, and a catalogue of reasons cannot be put together into love. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#162. In his life so far he had known only the kind of doubt that is calculated and secure. He had known only suspicion, cynicism, probability - never the fearful unraveling that comes when one ceases to trust in one's own trusting power; never the dread panic that follows this unraveling; never the dull void that follows last of all. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#163. My mum was a children's librarian, so I spent a lot of time in the library. My reading life, because of my mum's work, was evenly split between American, Canadian, Australian and British authors. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#164. I went to a state school in Christchurch, New Zealand, and then straight on to the University of Canterbury. But I worked part-time all the way through high school: first with a paper round, then at a fast-food outlet, a video store and a hardware store. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#165. I often feel intellectually frustrated when I'm in a position where I'm not moving forward; when I'm not enquiring about something. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#166. But 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. We are no longer sheltered in a cloistered reminiscence of the past. We now look outward, through the phantasm of our own convictions: we see the world as we wish to perfect it, and we imagine dwelling there. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#167. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#168. Ah Sook was very fond of Anna, and he believed that she was fond of him also. He knew, however, that the intimacy that they enjoyed together was less a togetherness than it was a shared isolation - for there is no relationship as private as that between the addict and his drug, and they both felt that isolation very keenly. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#169. He liked lonely places, because he never really felt alone. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#170. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#171. They turned away from one another, pretending to scan the faces of the crowd, and for a moment the two men shared the very same expression: the distant, slightly disappointed aspect of one who is comparing the scene around him, unfavourably, to other scenes, both real and imagined, that have happened, and are happening, elsewhere. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#172. It was his pleasure to strike up friendships within the servile classes, with children, with beggars, with animals, with plain women and forgotten men. His courtesies were always extended to those who did not expect courtesy: when he encountered a man whose station was beneath him, he was never rude. To the higher classes, however, he held himself apart. He was not ungracious, but his manner was jaded and wistful, even unimpressed - a practice that, though not a strategy in any real sense, tended to win him a great deal of respect, and earn him a place among the inheritors of land and fortune, quite as if he had set out to end up there. In this way Aubert Gascoigne, #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#173. Walter Moody was much experienced in the art of confidences. He knew that by confessing, one earned the subtle right to become confessor to the other, in his turn. A secret deserves a secret, and a tale deserves a tale; the gentle expectation of a response in kind was a pressure he knew how to apply. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#174. Moody had no small genius for the art of diplomacy. As a child 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 appearance of cooperation was worth a great deal, if only because it forced a reciprocity, fair met with fair. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#175. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#176. He had always been irreproachable in his conduct, and as a consequence, his capacity for empathy was small. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#177. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#178. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#179. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#180. I feel - as though a new chamber of my heart has opened." "Listen. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#181. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#182. Reason is no match for desire: when desire is purely and powerfully felt, it becomes a kind of reason of its own. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#183. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#184. I feel very strongly influenced by long-form box-set TV drama ... I feel really excited that, at last, the novel has found its on-screen equivalent, because the emotional arcs and changes that you can follow are just so much more like a novel, and so many amazing shows recently have done as much as film can do to show the interior world. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#185. Liberty and security!" he cried, waving his arm again. "Is that not what it comes down to? You see, I know the argument already! I know the form of it! Liberty over security, security over liberty ... provision from the father, freedom for the son. Of course the father might be too controlling - that can happen - and the son might be wasteful ... prodigal ... but it's the same quarrel, every time. Lovers too," he added, when Moody did not interject. "It's the same for lovers, too: at bottom, always, the same dispute. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#186. I require of all my students ... that they are downy and pubescent, pimpled with sullen mistrust, and boiling away with private fury and ardor and uncertainty and gloom. I require that they wait in the corridor for ten minutes at least before each lesson, tenderly nursing their injustices, picking miserably at their own unworthiness as one might finger a scab or caress a scar. If I am to teach your daughter, you darling hopeless and inadequate mother, she must be moody and bewildered and awkward and dissatisfied and wrong. When she realizes that he body is a secret, a dark and yawning secret of which she becomes more and more ashamed, come back to me. You must understand me on this point. I cannot teach children. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#187. His mind was of a most phlegmatic sort, cool in its private applications, quick, and excessively rational; he possessed a fault common to those of high intelligence, however, which was that he tended to regard the gift of his intellect as a license of a kind, by whose rarefied authority he was protected, in all circumstances, from ever behaving ill. He considered his moral obligations to be of an altogether different class than those of lesser men, and so rarely felt shame or compunction, except in very general terms. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#188. The past rolls forward to touch the present hour. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#189. 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. #Quote by Eleanor Catton

#190. Real prosperity can only come when everybody prospers. #Quote by Eleanor Roosevelt

#191. The Cat was a creature of absolute convictions, and his faith in his deductions never varied. #Quote by Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

#192. Sooner or later every gardener must face the fact that certain things are going to die on him. It is a temptation to be anthropomorphic about plants, to suspect that they do it to annoy. #Quote by Eleanor Perenyi

#193. I'll come back," she promised. "I'll always come back to you."
"I know," he said with cold, calm arrogance. "If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't let you go."
"Believe it. It's true." She took a step back. Then another. "Always."
"Eleanor, if you have any mercy in that dark heart of yours, when you leave right now, you will
walk and not run."
...
crawl and she didn't fly.
She ran. Down the hall she ran as if the hounds of hell nipped at her heels. She ran as if God
himself had ordered her to. She ran as if her life depended on it and in that moment she might
have sworn that it did.
She didn't know why she ran. She didn't know who or what waited for her in the White Room.
She only knew she had to get there as fast as she could and whoever it was, he was worth
running to. #Quote by Tiffany Reisz

#194. I think this is the ugliest place I've ever seen. Not just here. The whole state." I hear my parents telling me not to be negative, which is funny because I've always been the happy one. It's Eleanor who was moody. "I used to think that. But then I realized, believe it or not, it's actually beautiful to some people. It must be, because enough people live here, and they can't all think it's ugly." He smiles out at the ugly trees and the ugly farmland and the ugly kids as if he can see Oz. As if he can really, truly see the beauty that's there. In that moment I wish I could see it through his eyes. #Quote by Jennifer Niven

#195. The night they'd made love, Eleanor had given him everything. She'd placed her body and her pleasure in his hands, yes, but she'd given him her trust, too. He'd felt it in every sigh, every gasp, every kiss, and it had devastated him. Humbled him. It was the sweetest pleasure he'd ever known. #Quote by Anna Bradley

#196. Power corrupts. Knowledge is power. Study hard. Be evil. #Quote by Eleanor Roosevelt

#197. No man is defeated without until he has first been defeated within. #Quote by Eleanor Roosevelt

#198. Always count your blessings, even if you have to count them through your tears #Quote by Eleanor Brownn

#199. You [future first ladies] will feel that you are no longer clothing yourself, you are dressing a public monument. #Quote by Eleanor Roosevelt

#200. These people looked Japanese, were originally Japanese, were numerous. We had no way of knowing to what extent they had been infiltrated. To their great credit, it seems not to have been very much at all. But I can understand why. And I rather respect Eleanor for standing out against the tide at that point. But it certainly was a tide. And I'm not going to say it was unjustified. #Quote by William A. Rusher

#201. We gain strength, and courage, and confidence by each experience in which we really stop to look fear in the face ... we must do that which we think we cannot. - Eleanor Roosevelt #Quote by Aleatha Romig

#202. (Awesome is the word one uses for Eleanor Roosevelt, Mt. Kilimanjaro, and pitching a no-hit no-run ballgame. Not available for the crappy cheese quesadilla you had this afternoon, nor for anybody who Dances with the Stars. With or without a wooden leg.) #Quote by Harlan Ellison

#203. Women are like tea bags: put them in hot water and they get stronger. #Quote by Eleanor Roosevelt

#204. We're doing quite well in some states, but there are states that you can't - I mean, it's just ridiculous the representation of women, and having been an advocate for women, lobbied in many states as well as here at the national level for women. People behave differently when there are women at the table, men do. Our issues get higher prominence. We're taken more seriously. #Quote by Eleanor Smeal

#205. For our own success to be real, it must contribute to the success of others. #Quote by Eleanor Roosevelt

#206. We must want for others, not ourselves alone. #Quote by Eleanor Roosevelt

#207. I have always seen life personally; my interest or sympathy or indignation is not aroused by an abstract cause but by the plight of a single person ... Out of my response to an individual develops an awareness of a problem to the community, then to the country, then to the world. #Quote by Eleanor Roosevelt

#208. Usefulness, whatever form it may take, is the price we should pay for the air we breathe and the food we eat and the privilege of being alive. #Quote by Eleanor Roosevelt

#209. She (Eleanor Roosevelt) got even in a way that was almost cruel. She forgave them. #Quote by Ralph McGill

#210. I foresee a miracle occurring in the future."
"Which is?"
"You," Kingsley said as the team gathered on the sideline. "Being humbled."
"And what makes you say that?" Søren asked, sounding both imperious and sceptical.
Kingsley only smiled on and said three words.
"I met Eleanor. #Quote by Tiffany Reisz

#211. Anger is one letter short of danger. #Quote by Eleanor Roosevelt

#212. If there is a ground zero in the cultural wars, it is Missouri, a state where pro-life groups are strong and well organized and their agenda dominates local politics. #Quote by Eleanor Clift

#213. Each time you learn something new you must readjust the whole framework of your knowledge #Quote by Eleanor Roosevelt

#214. I do not think I will ever become deadened, because I live in other people's lives, I must admit there are times when it weighs medown because I can't do some of the things I want. #Quote by Eleanor Roosevelt

#215. There are practical little things in housekeeping which no man really understands. #Quote by Eleanor Roosevelt

#216. Carolyn Maloney has extensive - she's shown over and over again her creativity, her determination, her tenacity in fighting for women's rights. She has passed a host of bills in many different areas, both national and global, with both national and global importance for women, and she's on a Chair of Finance Committee so essentially in this economic crisis, we thought she would be perfect. #Quote by Eleanor Smeal

#217. Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something. #Quote by Rainbow Rowell

#218. America is not a pile of goods, more luxury, more comforts, a better telephone system, a greater number of cars. America is a dream of greater justice and opportunity for the average man and, if we can not obtain it, all our other
achievements amount to nothing. #Quote by Eleanor Roosevelt

#219. She did not want him. Had she ever? It is so easy to look at love when it is over and think it was never real. #Quote by Eleanor Brown

#220. She [Carolyn Maloney] understands the whole picture. She is comfortable with these issues 'cause she is chair of the committee, and she's dogged and will make sure the average woman and man is represented as well as making sure that our financial system stays afloat. In other words, she gets it and she has represented the financial district, but she also represents the average person and definitely the average woman. #Quote by Eleanor Smeal

#221. Both men and women are fallible. The difference is, women know it. #Quote by Eleanor Bron

#222. Eleanor Roosevelt's very helpful to a lot of children who cannot speak French, who do not write well. And Marie Souvestre is fierce. She tears up students' papers that are not, you know, perfect. And Eleanor Roosevelt goes around, again, being incredibly helpful to children in need, children in trouble. And her best friends are the naughtiest girls who are in trouble. And she is a leader. And she is encouraged to be a leader. And everybody falls in love with her. She's a star. #Quote by Blanche Wiesen Cook

#223. Looking at female candidates today, other women are the hardest on them, especially older women who were brought up in a different culture. #Quote by Eleanor Clift

#224. The bitter heart eats its owner. #Quote by Eleanor Morse

#225. If this is the Fey again I'm not sending nude pics, #Quote by Eleanor Rousseau

#226. Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people. #Quote by Eleanor Roosevelt

#227. Men see things late, and it may be that at times an evil fate drives them on. #Quote by Bruce Catton

#228. The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience. #Quote by Eleanor Roosevelt

#229. A lot of people say that Eleanor Roosevelt wasn't a good mother. And there are two pieces to that story. One is, when they were very young, she was not a good mother. She was an unhappy mother. She was an unhappy wife. She had never known what it was to be a good mother. She didn't have a good mother of her own. And so there's a kind of parenting that doesn't happen. #Quote by Blanche Wiesen Cook

#230. Eleanor [Marx] was involved in the 1889 Paris congress resolution that established May Day as an annual demonstration of the international solidarity of labour in the demand for a legal eight-hour day. #Quote by Rachel Holmes

#231. At the age of fifty-six Eleanor Stoddard was still a beautiful woman. She owned three hotels in France and another two in England. From nothing at all, she had built an empire. Eleanor had it all. Her one weakness was the young man sleeping beside her. #Quote by Barbara Taylor Bradford