Eleanor Catton famous quotes

04-27-2025

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

#Love #Together #Reason
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 doneâ€”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.
-- Eleanor Catton

#Self Esteem #Men #Judging
I have observed that male writers tend to get asked what they think and women what they feel. 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 â€“ 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.
-- Eleanor Catton

#Thinking #Ideas #Luck
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

#Real #Essence #Perfect
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.
-- Eleanor Catton

#Views #Sublime #Language
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.
-- Eleanor Catton

#Disappointment #Effort #Littles
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.
-- Eleanor Catton

#Moving #Different #Would Be
I really wanted to write an adventure story, a murder-mystery that was set during the gold-rush years in New Zealand.
-- Eleanor Catton

#Writing #Adventure #Years
I vote far-left. I am frequently angered by corporate greed and think education ought to be free and teachers paid well.
-- Eleanor Catton

#Teacher #Thinking #Greed
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.
-- Eleanor Catton

#Thinking #Speech #Facts
A man ought never to trust another mans evaluation of a third mans disposition.
-- Eleanor Catton

#Men #Evaluation #Disposition
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

#Mean #Astrology #Psychology
Whatâ€™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?
-- Eleanor Catton

#Girl #Heart #Race
Remember that anybody who is clever enough to set you free is clever enough to enslave you.
-- Eleanor Catton

#Life #Clever #Remember
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
-- Eleanor Catton

#Girl #School #Loner
A woman fallen has no future; a man risen has no past.
-- Eleanor Catton

#Past #Men #Fallen
All men want their ***** to be unhappy.
-- Eleanor Catton

#Men #Unhappy #Want
Reason is no match for desire: when desire is purely and powerfully felt, it becomes a kind of reason of its own.
-- Eleanor Catton

#Desire #Kind #Reason
The proper way to understand any social system was to view it from above.
-- Eleanor Catton

#Views #Way #Social
Never underestimate how extraordinarily difficult it is to understand a situation from another person's point of view.
-- Eleanor Catton

#Views #Underestimate #Point Of View
It is a feature of human nature to give what we most wish to receive.
-- Eleanor Catton

#Giving #Wish #Human Nature
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

#Self #Perspective #Weight

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