Top 120 Eleanor Catton Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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.”

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

54. “Worked like a Trojan. That’s one thing I’ll say for the Chinese: when it comes to pure old-fashioned work, you can’t fault them.”

— Eleanor Catton

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. “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

57. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

60. “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

61. “A secret always has a strengthening effect upon a newborn friendship, as does the shared impression that an external figure is to blame:.”

— Eleanor Catton

62. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

68. “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

69. “For human temperament was a volatile compound of perception and circumstance; Moody saw now that he could no more have.”

— Eleanor Catton

70. “Tauwhare could not respect a man who treated land as though it was just another kind of currency. Land could not be minted! Land could only be lived upon, and loved.”

— Eleanor Catton

71. “He was always in some chamber of his mind perceiving himself from the exterior.”

— Eleanor Catton

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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.”

— Eleanor Catton

76. “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.”

— Eleanor Catton

77. “Nothing shows like greenness, on a man.”

— Eleanor Catton

78. “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

79. “Gascoigne believed that justice ought to be a synonym for mercy, not an alternative.”

— Eleanor Catton

80. “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.”

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

82. “I take your point; it’s this twilight that’s the danger, between the old world and the new.”

— Eleanor Catton

83. “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.”

— Eleanor Catton

84. “I have always considered that there is a great deal of difference between keeping one’s own secret, and keeping a secret for another soul;.”

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

87. “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

88. “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

89. “When I am out of humour, do you know what I like to do? I like to drink.”

— Eleanor Catton

90. “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

91. “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

92. “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

93. “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.”

— Eleanor Catton

94. “But onward also rolls the outer sphere – the boundless present, which contains the bounded past.”

— Eleanor Catton

95. “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.”

— Eleanor Catton

96. “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

97. “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

98. “As might be expected, he was given to bouts of very purposeful ignorance, and tended to pass over the harsher truths of human nature in favor of those that could be romanticized by whimsy and imagination.”

— Eleanor Catton

99. “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 co-operation was worth a great deal, if only because it forced a reciprocity, fair met with fair.”

— Eleanor Catton

100. “Moody had left all discerning faculties in the pitching belly of the barque Godspeed. He wanted only shelter, and solitude.”

— Eleanor Catton