Quotes from The Luminaries

“Love cannot be reduced to a catalogue of reasons why, and a catalogue of reasons cannot be put together into love.”
― Eleanor Catton, quote from The Luminaries

“A woman fallen has no future; a man risen has no past.”
― Eleanor Catton, quote from The Luminaries

“Never underestimate how extraordinarily difficult it is to understand a situation from another person's point of view.”
― Eleanor Catton, quote from The Luminaries

“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 done—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, quote from The Luminaries

“Reason is no match for desire: when desire is purely and powerfully felt, it becomes a kind of reason of its own.”
― Eleanor Catton, quote from The Luminaries

“If home can't be where you come from, then home is what you make of where you go.”
― Eleanor Catton, quote from The Luminaries

“It is a feature of human nature to give what we most wish to receive.”
― Eleanor Catton, quote from The Luminaries

“We spend our entire lives thinking about death. Without that project to divert us, I expect we would all be dreadfully bored. We would have nothing to evade, and nothing to forestall, and nothing to wonder about. Time would have no consequence.”
― Eleanor Catton, quote from The Luminaries

“Solitude is a condition best enjoyed in company.”
― Eleanor Catton, quote from The Luminaries

“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—everyone together, sleeping in the dark.” “I am afraid I am interrupting your solitude,” Anna said. “No, no,” the boy said. “Oh, no. Solitude is a condition best enjoyed in company.” He grinned at her, quickly, and Anna smiled back. “Especially the company of one other soul,” he added, turning back to the sea.”
― Eleanor Catton, quote from The Luminaries

“I have heard that in the New Zealand native tradition, the soul, when it dies, becomes a star.”
― Eleanor Catton, quote from The Luminaries

“His temperament was deeply nostalgic, not for for his own past, but for past ages; he was cynical of the present, fearful of the future and profoundly regretful of the world's decay.”
― Eleanor Catton, quote from The Luminaries

“The proper way to understand any social system was to view it from above.”
― Eleanor Catton, quote from The Luminaries

“Money is a burden, a burden most keenly felt by the poor.”
― Eleanor Catton, quote from The Luminaries

“Luck only happens once and it's always an accident when it does.”
― Eleanor Catton, quote from The Luminaries

“All men want their whores to be unhappy.”
― Eleanor Catton, quote from The Luminaries

“Her carriage bespoke an exquisite misery, a wretchedness so perfect and so absolute that it manifested as dignity, as calm. More than a dark horse, she was darkness itself, the cloak of it.”
― Eleanor Catton, quote from The Luminaries

“He liked lonely places, because he never really felt alone.”
― Eleanor Catton, quote from The Luminaries

“Suffering, he thought later, could rob a man of his empathy, could turn him selfish, could make him depreciate all other sufferers.”
― Eleanor Catton, quote from The Luminaries

“In my experience people are rarely contented to end up where they started.”
― Eleanor Catton, quote from The Luminaries

“Moody had no small genius for the art of diplomacy. As a child he had known instinctively that it was always better to tell a partial truth with a willing aspect than to tell a perfect truth in a defensive way. The appearance of cooperation was worth a great deal, if only because it forced a reciprocity, fair met with fair.”
― Eleanor Catton, quote from The Luminaries

“A man ought never to trust another man’s evaluation of a third man’s disposition.”
― Eleanor Catton, quote from The Luminaries

“he built his persona as a shield around his person, because he knew very well how little his person could withstand.”
― Eleanor Catton, quote from The Luminaries

“How silently the world revolved, when one was brooding, and alone.”
― Eleanor Catton, quote from The Luminaries

“That’s a private interest of mine – what brings a fellow down here, you know, to the ends of the earth – what sparks a man?”
― Eleanor Catton, quote from The Luminaries

“It must have been unpleasant to be discussed as a curiosity, spoken about over breakfast, and between rounds at billiards, as if one's soul were a common property.”
― Eleanor Catton, quote from The Luminaries

“He was not surly by temperment, and in fact did not find it difficult to form friendships, nor to allow those friendships to deepen, once they had been formed; he simply preferred to answer to himself. He disliked all burdens of responsibility, most especially when those responsibilities were expected, or enforced--and friendship nearly always devolved into matters of debt, guilt, and expectation.”
― Eleanor Catton, quote from The Luminaries

“He wondered what assumptions she was forming, what picture was emerging from this scant constellation of his life.”
― Eleanor Catton, quote from The Luminaries

“One could know a thousand women, Gascoigne thought; one could take a different girl every night for years and years—but sooner or later, the new lovers would do little more than call to mind the old, and one would be forced to wander, lost, in that reflective maze of endless comparison, forever disappointed, forever turning back.”
― Eleanor Catton, quote from The Luminaries

“True feeling is always circular - either circular, or paradoxical - simply because its cause and its expression are tow halves of the very same thing! Love cannot be reduced to a catalogue of reasons why, and a catalogue of reasons cannot be put together into love. Any man who disagrees with me has never been in love - not truly.”
― Eleanor Catton, quote from The Luminaries

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― Anna Sewell, quote from Black Beauty

“What must it be, then, to bear the manifold tortures of hell forever? Forever! For all eternity! Not for a year or an age but forever. Try to imagine the awful meaning of this. You have often seen the sand on the seashore. How fine are its tiny grains! And how many of those tiny grains go to make up the small handful which a child grasps in its play. Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in thickness, and imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand multiplied as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals, atoms in the vast expanse of air. And imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all. Yet at the end of that immense stretch time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended. At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity would have scarcely begun. And if that mountain rose again after it had been carried all away again grain by grain, and if it so rose and sank as many times as there are stars in the sky, atoms in the air, drops of water in the sea, leaves on the trees, feathers upon birds, scales upon fish, hairs upon animals – at the end of all those innumerable risings and sinkings of that immeasurably vast mountain not even one single instant of eternity could be said to have ended; even then, at the end of such a period, after that eon of time, the mere thought of which makes our very brain reel dizzily, eternity would have scarcely begun.”
― James Joyce, quote from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“Each day means a new twenty-four hours. Each day means everything's possible again. You live in the moment, you die in the moment, you take it all one day at a time.”
― Marie Lu, quote from Legend

“Children should never have baths,’ my grandmother said. ‘It's a dangerous
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‘I agree, Grandmamma.”
― Roald Dahl, quote from The Witches

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

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