Top 120 Eleanor Catton Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “The difference between duty that is dreaded and duty that comes from love.”

— Eleanor Catton

102. “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

103. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

105. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

118. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

120. “Loneliness cannot be reassured by proportion.”

— Eleanor Catton

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

126. “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

127. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

137. “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

138. “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

139. “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