Quotes by Eleanor Catton

Pritchard was lonely, and like most lonely souls, he saw happy couples everywhere.

What an unrequited love it is, this thirst! But is it love, when it is unrequited?

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.

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.

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.

Fiction is supposed to be immersive and supposed to be entertaining and narrative, so structures have to be buried a little bit. If they come foregrounded too much, it stops being fiction and starts being poetry - something more concrete and out of time.

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