Top 140 Eleanor Catton Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

66. “It’s dreadful to feel alone and really be alone. But.”

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

69. “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

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. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

76. “You are exactly as charming as another man’s wife ought to be: it is only thanks to the likes of you that men get married at all. You make the idea of marriage seem very tolerable.”

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

83. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

85. “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

86. “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

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

91. “One of the reasons that horticulture held such strong appeal for Mira was that it offered her a respite from this habit of relentless interior critique. When she made things grow, she experienced a kind of manifest forgiveness, an abiding moving-on and making-new that she found impossible in almost every other sphere of life.”

— Eleanor Catton

92. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

94. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

97. “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

98. “She went into the smaller of the bedrooms and shut the door and climbed under the covers and lay wishing she was brave enough to kill herself as the sun traversed the sky above the ranges and filled the room with slanting yellow light.”

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton