Top 120 Eleanor Catton Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “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

3. “Never underestimate how extraordinarily difficult it is to understand a situation from another person’s point of view.”

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

6. “I see disappointment as something small and aggregate rather than something unified or great. With a little effort, every failure can be turned into something good.”

— Eleanor Catton

7. “I think the adverb is a much-maligned part of speech. Its always accused of being oppressive, even tyrannical, when in fact its so supple and sly.”

— Eleanor Catton

8. “I contend that there are no whole truths, there are only pertinent truths – and pertinence, you must agree, is always a matter of perspective.”

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

12. “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

13. “Solitude is a condition best enjoyed in company.”

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

15. “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

16. “What’s the likelihood? That the one girl who makes my heart race is the one girl who wants me in return? That the accident of my attraction coincides with the accident of hers?”

— Eleanor Catton

17. “Remember that anybody who is clever enough to set you free is clever enough to enslave you.”

— Eleanor Catton

18. “A man ought never to trust another mans evaluation of a third mans disposition.”

— Eleanor Catton

19. “I really wanted to write an adventure story, a murder-mystery that was set during the gold-rush years in New Zealand.”

— Eleanor Catton

20. “Astrologys a moving system that depends on where youre looking at it from on Earth. My horoscope here in London would be completely different to down in New Zealand.”

— Eleanor Catton

21. “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

22. “Disdain was useful. It gave him a fixed sense of proportion, a rightfulness to which he could appeal, and feel secure.”

— Eleanor Catton

23. “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.”

— Eleanor Catton

24. “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.”

— Eleanor Catton

25. “What had Balfour said, hours ago? “A string of coincidences is not a coincidence?” And what was a coincidence, Moody thought, but a stilled moment in a sequence that had yet to be explained?”

— Eleanor Catton

26. “In his mind a protective glaze had been applied to the crystal forms of high abstraction: he loved to regard them, and to wonder at their shine, but he had never thought to take them down from their carved and oaken mantel, so to speak, and feel them, supple in his hands.”

— Eleanor Catton

27. “One could know a thousand women, Gascoigne thought; one could take a different girl every night for years and years – but sooner or later, the new lovers would do little more than call to mind the old, and one would be forced to wander, lost, in that reflective maze of endless comparison, forever disappointed, forever turning back.”

— Eleanor Catton

28. “We were talking nonsense, and I said something silly about unrequited love, and he became very serious, and he stopped me, and he said that unrequited love was not possible; that it was not love. He said that love must be freely given, and freely taken, such that the lovers, in joining, make equal halves of something whole.”

— Eleanor Catton

29. “Repetition is a fortification like no other.”

— Eleanor Catton

30. “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

31. “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.”

— Eleanor Catton

32. “Solitude is a condition best enjoyed in company. Especially the company of one other soul. It’s dreadful to feel alone and really be alone. But I love to enjoy the feeling when I’m not.”

— Eleanor Catton

33. “The Australian light was very yellow, and there was a thickened quality to its brightness, as though the sun were always on the point of setting, even in the morning, or at noon.”

— Eleanor Catton

34. “He had always been irreproachable in his conduct, and as a consequence, his capacity for empathy was small.”

— Eleanor Catton

35. “No one can protect a soul against themselves – against their own hand, you know!”

— Eleanor Catton

36. “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

37. “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.”

— Eleanor Catton

38. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

40. “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

41. “Find a nugget, and a man can buy his own life. That kind of promise isn’t offered in the civil world.”

— Eleanor Catton

42. “Brother’ is another word for love, I think. The love we choose to give – and gladly.”

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

44. “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

45. “There is a great deal of difference between keeping one’s own secret and keeping a secret for another soul; so much so that I wish we had two worlds, that is a word for a secret of one’s own making and a word for a secret that on did not make, and perhaps did not wish for, but has chosen to keep, all the same.” Page 788.”

— Eleanor Catton

46. “I would make up silver lies studded with shards of perfect detail like mosaic splinters, sharp and everlasting, the kind of tiny faultless detail that would make them all sure that what I said was true. I would have alibis. I would bring in other people and teach them a story, and rehearse it so carefully and for so long that soon they’d all start to believe that what they said was actually true.”

— Eleanor Catton

47. “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.”

— Eleanor Catton

48. “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

49. “If I have learned one thing from experience, it is this: never underestimate how extraordinarily difficult it is to understand a situation from another person’s point of view.”

— Eleanor Catton

50. “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.”

— Eleanor Catton