Top 140 Eleanor Catton Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

103. “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

104. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

106. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

108. “Give us a tale, and spin it out, so we forget about our feet, and we don’t notice that we’re walking.”

— Eleanor Catton

109. “Loneliness cannot be reassured by proportion.”

— Eleanor Catton

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

120. “But she was not unaware that there was a certain satisfaction to be found in hopelessness, a certain piety, a touch of martyrdom, in feeling oneself and one’s entire generation to have been wronged by those in power, and deceived, and discouraged from civic participation, and robbed, and made fun of, and maligned;.”

— Eleanor Catton

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

130. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

138. “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

139. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

141. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

144. “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

145. “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