Eleanor Catton Quotes

Love cannot be reduced to a catalogue of reasons why, and a catalogue of reasons cannot be put together into love.

I think the adverb is a much-maligned part of speech. Its always accused of being oppressive, even tyrannical, when in fact its so supple and sly.

Never underestimate how extraordinarily difficult it is to understand a situation from another person's point of view.

To experience sublime natural beauty is to confront the total inadequacy of language to describe what you see. Words cannot convey the scale of a view that is so stunning it is felt.

I really wanted to write an adventure story, a murder-mystery that was set during the gold-rush years in New Zealand.

She is a loner, too bright for the slutty girls and too savage for the bright girls, haunting the edges and corners of the school like a sullen disillusioned ghost

I often feel intellectually frustrated when I'm in a position where I'm not moving forward; when I'm not enquiring about something.

Remember that anybody who is clever enough to set you free is clever enough to enslave you.

A woman fallen has no future; a man risen has no past.

The way that I see astrology is as a repository of thought and psychology. A system we've created as a culture as way to make things mean things.

I see disappointment as something small and aggregate rather than something unified or great. With a little effort, every failure can be turned into something good.

Solitude is a condition best enjoyed in company.

I vote far-left. I am frequently angered by corporate greed and think education ought to be free and teachers paid well.

A man ought never to trust another mans evaluation of a third mans disposition.

Reason is no match for desire: when desire is purely and powerfully felt, it becomes a kind of reason of its own.

The proper way to understand any social system was to view it from above.

It is a feature of human nature to give what we most wish to receive.

Astrologys a moving system that depends on where youre looking at it from on Earth. My horoscope here in London would be completely different to down in New Zealand.

What’s the likelihood? That the one girl who makes my heart race is the one girl who wants me in return? That the accident of my attraction coincides with the accident of hers?

What an unrequited love it is, this thirst! But is it love, when it is unrequited?

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

I wish to be able to call myself deserving of my lot, ' Moody said carefully. 'Luck is by nature underserved.

We observe that one of the great attributes of discretion is that it can mask ignorance of all the most common and lowly varieties, and Walter Moody was nothing if not excessively discreet.

It is not yet a feeling that points her in a direction. It is just the feeling of a vacuum, a void waiting to be filled.

If I have learned one thing from experience, it is this: never underestimate how extraordinarily difficult it is to understand a situation from another person's point of view.

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

He liked lonely places, because he never really felt alone.

for Pop, who sees the starsand Jude, who hears their music