Quotes by Eleanor Catton

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

“The saxophone is the cocaine of the woodwind family, the sax teacher continues. Saxophonists are admired because they are dangerous, because they have explored a darker, more sinister side of thems...”

“The saxophone does not speak that language. The saxophone speaks the language of the underground, the jaded melancholy of the half-lightgrimy and sexy and sweaty and hard. It is the language of orp...”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“Let's just enjoy it for ourselves. Dawn is such a private hour, don't you think? Such a solitary hour. One always hears that said of midnight, but I think of midnight as remarkably companionableeve...”

“Solitude is a condition best enjoyed in company.”

“We were talking nonsense, and I said something silly about unrequited love, and he became very serious, and he stopped me, and he said that unrequited love was not possible; that it was not love. H...”

“He and Anna lay facing each other, Staines lying on his left hip, and Anna, on her right, both of them with their knees drawn up to their chests, Staines with one hand tucked beneath his bandaged s...”

“What was glimpsed in Aquariuswhat was envisioned, believed in, prophesied, predicted, doubted, and forewarnedis made, in Pisces, manifest. Those solitary visions that, but a month ago, belonged onl...”

“Are you fixing to stay in this country, then, Walter? After you've dug yourself a patch, and made yourself a pile?''I expect my luck will decide that question for me.''Would you call it lucky to st...”

“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”

“She gave a shiver, and suddenly clutched her arms about her body. She spoke, Gascoigne thought, with an exhilarated fatigue, the kind that comes after the first blush of love, when the self has los...”

“Is it the smoke?' the boy said, shivering slightly. 'I've never touched the stuff, myself, but how it claws at one...like a thorn in every one of your fingers, and a string around your heart...and ...”

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