Catton Quotes & Sayings

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

Any description of a person that comes from the outside is very hard to deal with. People don't like being summarised. It's nice to receive a compliment, but it makes me feel a bit uncomfortable. — Eleanor Catton

Early youth is a baffling time. — Bruce Catton

I think I was always subconsciously driven by an attempt to restate that faith and to show where it was properly grounded, how it grew out of what a great many young men on both sides felt and believed and were brave enough to do. — Bruce Catton

It is always a starkly private moment when a governor first apprehends his subject as a man - perhaps not as an equal, but at least as a being, irreducible, possessed of frailties, enthusiasms, a real past, and an uncertain future. — Eleanor Catton

The first blush of love, when the self has lost its mooring, and, half-drowning, succumbs to a fearful tide. — Eleanor Catton

Gascoigne believed that justice ought to be a synonym for mercy, not an alternative. — Eleanor Catton

A certain combination of incompetence and indifference can cause almost as much suffering as the most acute malevolence. — Bruce Catton

I think that, in principle, a workshop is such a beautiful idea - an environment in which writers who are collectively apprenticed to the craft of writing can come together in order to collectively improve. — Eleanor Catton

You're of a mind with Mr. Staines.'
'Am I?'
'Yes,' Anna said. 'That is precisely the sort of thing that he would say.'
'Your Mr. Staines is quite the philosopher, Miss Wetherell.'
'Why, Reverend,' Anna said, smiling suddenly, 'I believe you've just paid yourself a compliment. — Eleanor Catton

Land could not be minted! Land could only be lived upon, and loved. — Eleanor Catton

My mum was a children's librarian, so I spent a lot of time in the library. My reading life, because of my mum's work, was evenly split between American, Canadian, Australian and British authors. — Eleanor Catton

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 - everyone together, sleeping in the dark.'
'I am afraid I am interrupting your solitude,' Anna said.
'No, no,' the boy said. 'Oh, no. Solitude is best enjoyed in company.' He grinned at her, quickly, and Anna smiled back. 'Especially the company of one other soul,' he added, turning back to the sea. 'It's dreadful to feel alone and really be alone. But I love to enjoy the feeling when I'm not. — Eleanor Catton

My parents took me to the Bronte parsonage in England when I was a teenager. I had a fight with my mum, burst into tears, jumped over a stile and ran out into the moors. It felt very authentic: A moor really is an excellent place to have a temper tantrum. — Eleanor Catton

We think it sufficient to say, at this juncture, that there were eight passengers aboard the Godspeed when she pulled out of the harbour at Dunedin, and by the time the barque landed on the Coast, there were nine. The ninth was not a baby, born in transit; nor was he a stowaway; nor did the ship's lookout spot him adrift in the water, clinging to some scrap of wreckage, and give the shout to draw him in. — Eleanor Catton

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 shoulder, Anna with one hand tucked beneath her cheek. She must have turned toward him, some time in the night: her left arm was flung outward, her fingers reaching, her palm turned down ...
Devlin came closer ... He looked down at Anna and Emery, their mirrored bodies, facing in. They were breathing in tandem.
So they are lovers, he thought, looking down at them. So they are lovers, after all. He knew it from the way that they were sleeping. — Eleanor Catton

What I feel is that true creation happens when you're making something out of nothing - like it's divine, you know. Creation is a completely divine concept. — Eleanor Catton

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

But time and distance is nothing in the face of true affinity ... — Eleanor Catton

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

A lucky man ... is a man who was lucky once, and after that, he learned a thing or two about investment. p 553 — Eleanor Catton

Te Rau Tauwhare was a man for whom the act of love was the true religion, and the altar of this religion was one in place of which no idols could be made. — Eleanor Catton

His temperament was deeply nostalgic, not for for his own past, but for past ages; he was cynical of the present, fearful of the future and profoundly regretful of the world's decay. — Eleanor Catton

He wondered what assumptions she was forming, what picture was emerging from this scant constellation of his life. — Eleanor Catton

The nice thing about the zodiac as a system is it is quite comprehensive as a range of impulses and psychological states it can speak about. — Eleanor Catton

I've had countless reviews sort that have made me cry. It's funny, it doesn't ever get better either; you can't turn your ears off. — Eleanor Catton

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

And the hermit's spirit detaches itself, ever so gently, and begins its lonely passage upward, to find its final resting place among the stars. — Eleanor Catton

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

I went to a state school in Christchurch, New Zealand, and then straight on to the University of Canterbury. But I worked part-time all the way through high school: first with a paper round, then at a fast-food outlet, a video store and a hardware store. — Eleanor Catton

Say this for big league baseball - it is beyond any question the greatest conversation piece ever invented in America. — Bruce Catton

Round here, everybody's always talking about home,' said Balfour. 'Can't help but think that the pleasure's in the missing. — Eleanor Catton

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 one fees it always. Nagging. Nagging. — Eleanor Catton

When I was writing 'The Luminaries,' I read a lot of crime novels because I wanted to figure out which ones made me go, 'Ah! I didn't know that was coming!' — Eleanor Catton

Progress is the sum of small victories won by individual human beings. — Bruce Catton

In my experience people are rarely contented to end up where they started. — Eleanor Catton

Like most Rebel soldiers, Sam Watkins owned no slaves. — Bruce Catton

Some folk are dealt a bad hand. But you can't rely on another person's conscience to live the life you want to live. You make do with what you're given; you struggle on. — Eleanor Catton

Teaching is a great complement to writing. It's very social and gets you out of your own head. It's also very optimistic. It renews itself every year - it's a renewable resource. — Eleanor Catton

The room seemed suddenly to clarify, as when a chance scatter of stars resolves into a constellation before the eye. — Eleanor Catton

Sometimes I'll read something on Twitter, and I'll just be in the darkest of moods for the rest of the day or the rest of the week sometimes. — Eleanor Catton

Liberty and security!" he cried, waving his arm again. "Is that not what it comes down to? You see, I know the argument already! I know the form of it! Liberty over security, security over liberty ... provision from the father, freedom for the son. Of course the father might be too controlling - that can happen - and the son might be wasteful ... prodigal ... but it's the same quarrel, every time. Lovers too," he added, when Moody did not interject. "It's the same for lovers, too: at bottom, always, the same dispute. — Eleanor Catton

Worked like a Trojan. That's one thing I'll say for the Chinese: when it comes to pure old-fashioned work, you can't fault them. — Eleanor Catton

Remember that these years of your daughters life are only the rehearsal for everything that comes after. Remember that its in her best interests to slip up now, while she's still safe in the green room ... Dont wait until she's out in the savage white light of the floods, where everyone can see. Let her practice everything in a safe environment, with a helmet and kneepads and packed lunches, and you at the end of the hall with the door cracked open in case anyone cries out in the long hours of the night. — Eleanor Catton

A man with no memory was a man with no foresight - to — Eleanor Catton

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. — Eleanor Catton

The illusion of depth in a character is created simply by withholding information from an audience. A character will seem complex and intriguing only if we don't know the reasons why. — Eleanor Catton

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

Has he made an avowal of his love?'
'No,' Anna said. 'He doesn't need to. I know it, just the same. — Eleanor Catton

Theatre is a concentrate of life as normal. Theatre is a purified version of real life, an extraction, an essence of human behaviour that is stranger and more tragic and more perfect than everything that is ordinary about me and you. — Eleanor Catton

She was tried for trying to take her own life," Gascoigne said. "There's a symmetry in that, do you not think? Tried for trying. — Eleanor Catton

In his mind a protective glaze had been applied to the crystal forms of high abstraction: he loved to regard them, and to wonder at their shine, but he had never thought to take them down from their carved and oaken mantel, so to speak, and feel them, supple in his hands. — Eleanor Catton

I much prefer a plotted novel to a novel that is really conceptual. — Eleanor Catton

Luck is never the whole picture, — Eleanor Catton

Walter Moody was much experienced in the art of confidences. He knew that by confessing, one earned the subtle right to become confessor to the other, in his turn. A secret deserves a secret, and a tale deserves a tale; the gentle expectation of a response in kind was a pressure he knew how to apply. — Eleanor Catton

From the very beginning, I had an ambition for 'The Luminaries': a direction - but not a real idea. — Eleanor Catton

He was not surly by temperment, and in fact did not find it difficult to form friendships, nor to allow those friendships to deepen, once they had been formed; he simply preferred to answer to himself. He disliked all burdens of responsibility, most especially when those responsibilities were expected, or enforced
and friendship nearly always devolved into matters of debt, guilt, and expectation. — Eleanor Catton

Nathan Bedford Forrest ... used his horsemen as a modern general would use motorized infantry. He liked horses because he liked fast movement, and his mounted men could get from here to there much faster than any infantry could; but when they reached the field they usually tied their horses to trees and fought on foot, and they were as good as the very best infantry. Not for nothing did Forrest say the essence of strategy was to git thar fust with the most men. — Bruce Catton

Cowell Devlin sighed. Yes, he understood Anna Wetherell at long last, but it was not a happy understanding. Devlin had known many women of poor prospects and limited means, whose only transport out of the miserable cage of their unhappy circumstance was the flight of the fantastic. Such fantasies were invariably magical - angelic patronage, invitations into paradise - and Anna's story, touching though it was, showed the same strain of the impossible. Why, it was painfully clear! The most eligible bachelor of Anna's acquaintance possessed a love so deep and pure that all respective differences between them were rendered immaterial? He was not dead - he was only missing? He was sending her 'messages' that proved the depth of his love - and these were messages that only she could hear? It was a fantasy, Devlin thought. It was a fantasy of the girl's own devising. The boy could only be dead. — Eleanor Catton

As an artist, you need to be not at all entitled in your relation with the work. So money is kind of worrying. You can start to expect things if you're used to a certain level of comfort. — Eleanor Catton

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

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

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

Here was the greatest and most moving chapter in American history, a blending of meanness and greatness, an ending and a beginning. It came out of what men were, but it did not go as men had planned. — Bruce Catton

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

It's dreadful to feel alone and really be alone. But — Eleanor Catton

One could know a thousand women, Gascoigne thought; one could take a different girl every night for years and years - but sooner or later, the new lovers would do little more than call to mind the old, and one would be forced to wander, lost, in that reflective maze of endless comparison, forever disappointed, forever turning back. — Eleanor Catton

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

Long historical books get written by women, but not contemporary experiments, which still seems to be a very male-dominated field. — Eleanor Catton

Would you call it lucky to stay, or lucky to go?"
"I'd call it lucky to choose", said Moody. — Eleanor Catton

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

He wished he were home in Charleston, listening to the Dave Brubeck Quartet on the stereo and reading Bruce Catton. — Dan Simmons

WHEN A RESTLESS spirit is commissioned, under influence, to solve a riddle for another man, his energies are, at first, readily and faithfully applied. — Eleanor Catton

It was the duty of every thinking man to expose himself to a great range of characters, situations, and points of view. He had read extensively, and although he favored the Romantics above all others, and never tired of discussing the properties of the sublime, he was by no means a strict disciple of that school, or indeed, of any school at all. — Eleanor Catton

I think the adverb is a much-maligned part of speech. It's always accused of being oppressive, even tyrannical, when in fact it's so supple and sly. — Eleanor Catton

As he watched her sleep he had often been near-choked with joy; — Eleanor Catton

I think that writers of literary fiction would do well to read more books for children. — Eleanor Catton

For he was still unable to recall the apparition wholly to his own mind, much less to form a narrative for the pleasures of a third. — Eleanor Catton

Often I listen to songs on repeat for days and days at a time. There's something hypnotic or meditative, and it mirrors the way that I am putting the sentence together, going back over the same phrases again and again. — Eleanor Catton

It is perfectly serendipitous,' said the boy, descending the steps to the street. 'Fancy that - us meeting a second time! Of course I have wished for it, very much - but they were vain wishes; the kind one makes in twilight states, you know, idly. I remember just what you said, as we rounded the heads of the harbor - in the dawn light. "I should like to see him in a storm," you said. I have thought of it many times, since; it was the most delightfully original of speeches.'
Anna blushed at this: not only had she never heard herself described as an original before, she had certainly never supposed that her utterances qualified as 'speeches. — Eleanor Catton

I loved 'Middlemarch,' I think that's one of my favourite books of all time, actually. — Eleanor Catton

I feel very strongly influenced by long-form box-set TV drama ... I feel really excited that, at last, the novel has found its on-screen equivalent, because the emotional arcs and changes that you can follow are just so much more like a novel, and so many amazing shows recently have done as much as film can do to show the interior world. — Eleanor Catton

Shepard's theory of law had roused his intelligence, and gratified it, and he again felt master of his faculties. — Eleanor Catton

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. — Eleanor Catton

The Civil War was fought in 10,000 places, from Valverde, New Mexico, and Tullahoma, Tennessee, to St. Albans, Vermont, and Fernandina on the Florida coast. More than 3 million Americans fought in it, and over 600,000 men, 2 percent of the population, died in it. — Bruce Catton

Deprecation always waits to be disputed, and, if the disputation does not come, becomes petulance. — Eleanor Catton

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 stay, or lucky to go?'
'I'd call it lucky to choose,' said Moody - surprising himself, for that was not the answer he would have given, three months prior. — Eleanor Catton

A trip to the picture framer's, with a selection of prints, is the most joyous outing I can imagine. I've spent more money on framing than on anything else I own. — Eleanor Catton

His vanity required constant stimulation, and constant proof that the ongoing creation of his selfhood was a project that he himself controlled. — Eleanor Catton

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 starts being poetry - something more concrete and out of time. — Eleanor Catton

He spoke as a disappointed man, for whom perfection existed only as something remembered - and then regretted, because it was lost. — Eleanor Catton

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

It is a mark of the depth of their wounding that they are pretending they suspected it all along. Everything that they have seen and been told about love so far has been an inside perspective, and they are not prepared for the crashing weight of this exclusion. It dawns on them now how much they never saw and how little they were wanted, and with this dawning comes a painful re-imagining of the self as peripheral, uninvited, and utterly minor. — Eleanor Catton

I think that's what fiction writing is actually all about. It's about trying to solve problems in creative ways. — Eleanor Catton

History does not usually make real sense until long afterward. — Bruce Catton

Staines was not a terribly good judge of character. He loved to be enchanted, and so was very often drawn to persons whose manner was suggestive of tragedy, romance, or myth. — Eleanor Catton

Money doesn't transform a person - the only thing that can is love. — Eleanor Catton

What was a coincidence, Moody thought, but a stilled moment in a sequence that had yet to be explained? — Eleanor Catton

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. We are no longer sheltered in a cloistered reminiscence of the past. We now look outward, through the phantasm of our own convictions: we see the world as we wish to perfect it, and we imagine dwelling there. — Eleanor Catton

Soldiers who had been in the army long enough to know what a bloody swindle war really is would begin to feel that army life was really kind of fun, as long as [General Philip] Sheridan was up front. — Bruce Catton