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

102. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

128. “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

129. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

131. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

133. “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

134. “Loneliness cannot be reassured by proportion.”

— Eleanor Catton

135. “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

136. “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

137. “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

138. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

140. “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

141. “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

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

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

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

— Eleanor Catton

145. “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