Top 120 Eleanor Catton Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

53. “I wish to be able to call myself deserving of my lot,′ Moody said carefully. ‘Luck is by nature underserved.”

— Eleanor Catton

54. “But like most extremely sensitive people, Gascoigne could not bear sensitivity in others: he required honesty and directness when he was asked a question – and he required it all the more desperately when he was vexed.”

— Eleanor Catton

55. “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

56. “Gold was like all capital in that it had no memory: its drift was always onward, away from the past.”

— Eleanor Catton

57. “They would meet in darkness; their encounters would be feverish and doomed.”

— Eleanor Catton

58. “If home can’t be where you come from, then home is what you make of where you go.”

— Eleanor Catton

59. “You miss the old country. Of course you do. But you don’t go back.”

— Eleanor Catton

60. “Miss Wetherell lived by the will of the dragon, after all, a drug that played steward to an imbecile king, and she would guard that throne with jealous eyes forever.”

— Eleanor Catton

61. “We learned that you can only feel one thing at one time,” says Isolde. “You can feel excitement or you can feel fear but you can never feel both. We learned why beauty is so important: beauty is important because you can’t really defile something that is already ugly, and to defile is the ultimate goal of the sexual impulse. We learned that you can always say no.”

— Eleanor Catton

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

66. “It’s dreadful to feel alone and really be alone. But I love to enjoy the feeling when I’m not.”

— Eleanor Catton

67. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

69. “Where are you off to?’ The question rankled Gascoigne. How dreary frontier living could be! Every man was asked to share his private business; it was not like Paris, or London, where one felt the luxury of strangeness on every corner; where one could really be alone.”

— Eleanor Catton

70. “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

71. “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?”

— Eleanor Catton

72. “Land could not be minted! Land could only be lived upon, and loved.”

— Eleanor Catton

73. “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

74. “With this realization the room seemed suddenly to clarify, as when a chance scatter of stars resolves into a constellation before the eye.”

— Eleanor Catton

75. “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

76. “Shepard’s theory of law had roused his intelligence, and gratified it, and he again felt master of his faculties.”

— Eleanor Catton

77. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

79. “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.”

— Eleanor Catton

80. “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

81. “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

82. “He tapped the base of his glass upon the table. “England – that’s the old country. You miss the old country. Of course you do. But you don’t go back.”

— Eleanor Catton

83. “I suppose that to know a thing is to see it from all sides.”

— Eleanor Catton

84. “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

85. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

87. “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

88. “The frontier I think makes brothers of us all.”

— Eleanor Catton

89. “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.”

— Eleanor Catton

90. “Strains of Saturday night filtered in from the street – an.”

— Eleanor Catton

91. “There’s something so joyless about the left these days,’ Tony continued, ‘so forbidding and self-denying. And policing. No one’s having any fun, we’re all just sitting around scolding each other for doing too much or not enough – and it’s like, what kind of vision for the future is that? Where’s the hope? Where’s the humanity? We’re all aspiring to be monks when we could be aspiring to be lovers.”

— Eleanor Catton

92. “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.”

— Eleanor Catton

93. “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.”

— Eleanor Catton

94. “The difference between duty that is dreaded and duty that comes from love.”

— Eleanor Catton

95. “Every spoke on the great wheel of luck was visible on a Saturday – there were men rising, risen, just falling, fallen, and at rest – and that night every digger would either drink his sorrow, or his joy.”

— Eleanor Catton

96. “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.”

— Eleanor Catton

97. “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

98. “Round here, everybody’s always talking about home,’ said Balfour. ‘Can’t help but think that the pleasure’s in the missing.”

— Eleanor Catton

99. “What an unrequited love it is, this thirst! But is it love, when it is unrequited?”

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton