Eleanor Catton Quotes

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

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

I have observed that male writers tend to get asked what they think and women what they feel," she says. "In my experience, and that of a lot of other women writers, all of the questions coming at them from interviewers tend to be about how lucky they are to be where they are – about luck and identity and how the idea struck them. The interviews much more seldom engage with the woman as a serious thinker, a philosopher, as a person with preoccupations that are going to sustain them for their lifetime.

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

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?

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

All men want their whores to be unhappy.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

For although a man is judged by his actions, by what he has said and done, a man judges himself by what he is willing to do, by what he might have said, or might have done—a judgment that is necessarily hampered, not only by the scope and limits of his imagination, but by the ever-changing measure of his doubt and self-esteem.

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

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.

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

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.

Solitude is a condition best enjoyed in company.