Quotes by Eleanor Catton

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Fiction is supposed to be immersive and supposed to be entertaining and narrative, so structures have to be buried a little bit. If they come foregrounded too much, it stops being fiction and start...”

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

“I would make up silver lies studded with shards of perfect detail like mosaic splinters, sharp and everlasting, the kind of tiny faultless detail that would make them all sure that what I said was ...”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What was glimpsed in Aquarius—what was envisioned, believed in, prophesied, predicted, doubted, and forewarned—is made, in Pisces, manifest. Those solitary visions that, but a month ago, belonged o...”

“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.”

“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.”

“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...”

“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...”

“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 companionable—ev...”

“Solitude is a condition best enjoyed in company.”