135 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.

Solitude is a condition best enjoyed in company.

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.

You are exactly as charming as another man's wife ought to be: it is only thanks to the likes of you that men get married at all. You make the idea of marriage seem very tolerable.

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

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. He said that love must be freely given, and freely taken, such that the lovers, in joining, make equal halves of something whole.

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

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.

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 true. I would have alibis. I would bring in other people and teach them a story, and rehearse it so carefully and for so long that soon they’d all start to believe that what they said was actually true.