Eleanor Catton Quotes

41 quotes in 670 categories

• It is a feature of human nature to give what we most wish to receive.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Remember that anybody who is clever enough to set you free is clever enough to enslave you.
• 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…
• Love cannot be reduced to a catalogue of reasons why, and a catalogue of reasons cannot be put together into love.
• A woman fallen has no future; a man risen has no past.
• All men want their whores to be unhappy.
• Reason is no match for desire: when desire is purely and powerfully felt, it becomes a kind of reason of its own.
• The proper way to understand any social system was to view it from above.
• 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…
• Never underestimate how extraordinarily difficult it is to understand a situation from another person's point of view.
• 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…
• The ability of humans to read meaning into patterns is the most defining characteristic we have.
• 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…
• I really wanted to write an adventure story, a murder-mystery that was set during the gold-rush years in New Zealand.
• I have always loved reading books for children and young adults, particularly when those books are mysteries.

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