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

52. “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

53. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

62. “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

63. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

69. “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

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

76. “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

77. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

86. “Democracy isn’t about everyone voting the exact same way, it’s about whether you agree to go along with the outcome of the vote even if it turns out you’re in the minority. That’s consensus.”

— Eleanor Catton

87. “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

88. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

91. “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

92. “He had a playful distaste for men who spoke, as he phrased it, “much too well,” and he loved to provoke them – not to anger, which bored him, but to vulgarity.”

— Eleanor Catton

93. “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

94. “Like all self-mythologising rebels, Mira preferred enemies to rivals, and often turned her rivals into enemies, the better to disdain them as secret agents of the status quo.”

— Eleanor Catton

95. “His vanity required constant stimulation, and constant proof that the ongoing creation of his selfhood was a project that he himself controlled.”

— Eleanor Catton

96. “But could he endure it, that other men knew her in a way that he, Staines, did not? He did not know.”

— Eleanor Catton

97. “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

98. “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

99. “Like all self-mythologising rebels, Mira preferred enemies to rivals, and often turned her rivals into enemies, the better to disdain them as secret agents of the status quo. But because this was not a conscious habit, she experienced only a vague feeling of righteous defiance as, unable to dismiss Owen Darvish, she told herself instead that she disliked him.”

— Eleanor Catton

100. “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.”

— Eleanor Catton