Top 120 Eleanor Catton Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 3 of 3

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

— Eleanor Catton

102. “It was not an unhappy childhood, but Frost was unhappy when he recalled it.”

— Eleanor Catton

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

109. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

111. “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

112. “There was something cold and hard about the man, Nilssen thought – diverting his own ill feeling, as he often did, into a principle of aesthetic distaste.”

— Eleanor Catton

113. “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

114. “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

115. “He spoke as a disappointed man, for whom perfection existed only as something remembered – and then regretted, because it was lost.”

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

123. “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

124. “Clinch’s efforts in love were always of a mothering sort, for it is a feature of human nature to give what we most wish to receive, and it was a mother that Edgar Clinch most craved – his own having died in his infancy, and since then been resurrected as a goddess of shining virtue in his mind, a goddess whose face was as a blurred shape, seen through a window on a night of fog.”

— Eleanor Catton

125. “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

126. “He did not mention that his skill was as a carver. He had never sold pounamu. He would not sell pounamu. For one could not put a price upon a treasure, just as one could not purchase mana, and one could not make a bargain with a god. Gold was not a treasure – this Tauwhare knew. Gold was like all capital in that it had no memory: its drift was always onward, away from the past.”

— Eleanor Catton

127. “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

128. “I feel – as though a new chamber of my heart has opened.” “Listen.”

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

131. “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

132. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

135. “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

136. “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

137. “Loneliness cannot be reassured by proportion.”

— Eleanor Catton

138. “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

139. “But shame, for Mannering, was an emotion that attended only failure; he could not be made to feel compunction if he had not, in his own estimation, failed.”

— Eleanor Catton