“ The saxophone is the cocaine of the woodwind family, the sax teacher continues. Saxophonists are admired because they are dangerous, because they have explored a darker, more sinister side of themselv… Eleanor Catton
“ 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 b… Eleanor Catton
“ 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
“ If I have learned one thing from experience, it is this: never underestimate how extraordinarily difficult it is to understand a situation from another person's point of view. Eleanor Catton
“ 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
“ 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 tru… Eleanor Catton
“ I wish to be able to call myself deserving of my lot,' Moody said carefully. 'Luck is by nature underserved. Eleanor Catton
“ Is it the smoke?' the boy said, shivering slightly. 'I've never touched the stuff, myself, but how it claws at one...like a thorn in every one of your fingers, and a string around your heart...and one… Eleanor Catton
“ She gave a shiver, and suddenly clutched her arms about her body. She spoke, Gascoigne thought, with an exhilarated fatigue, the kind that comes after the first blush of love, when the self has lost i… Eleanor Catton
“ 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
“ Let's just enjoy it for ourselves. Dawn is such a private hour, don't you think? Such a solitary hour. One always hears that said of midnight, but I think of midnight as remarkably companionable—every… Eleanor Catton
“ Are you fixing to stay in this country, then, Walter? After you've dug yourself a patch, and made yourself a pile?''I expect my luck will decide that question for me.''Would you call it lucky to stay,… Eleanor Catton
“ He and Anna lay facing each other, Staines lying on his left hip, and Anna, on her right, both of them with their knees drawn up to their chests, Staines with one hand tucked beneath his bandaged shou… Eleanor Catton
“ We were talking nonsense, and I said something silly about unrequited love, and he became very serious, and he stopped me, and he said that unrequited love was not possible; that it was not love. He s… Eleanor Catton
“ We observe that one of the great attributes of discretion is that it can mask ignorance of all the most common and lowly varieties, and Walter Moody was nothing if not excessively discreet. Eleanor Catton
“ It is not yet a feeling that points her in a direction. It is just the feeling of a vacuum, a void waiting to be filled. Eleanor Catton
“ What was glimpsed in Aquarius—what was envisioned, believed in, prophesied, predicted, doubted, and forewarned—is made, in Pisces, manifest. Those solitary visions that, but a month ago, belonged only… Eleanor Catton
