Eleanor Catton Quotations

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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

All men want their whores to be unhappy.

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

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