The Luminaries

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.

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

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.

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

If home can't be where you come from, then home is what you make of where you go.

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

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.

Solitude is a condition best enjoyed in company.

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.

I have heard that in the New Zealand native tradition, the soul, when it dies, becomes a star.

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.

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

Money is a burden, a burden most keenly felt by the poor.

Luck only happens once and it's always an accident when it does.

All men want their whores to be unhappy.

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.

He liked lonely places, because he never really felt alone.

Suffering, he thought later, could rob a man of his empathy, could turn him selfish, could make him depreciate all other sufferers.

In my experience people are rarely contented to end up where they started.

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.

A man ought never to trust another man’s evaluation of a third man’s disposition.

he built his persona as a shield around his person, because he knew very well how little his person could withstand.

How silently the world revolved, when one was brooding, and alone.

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?

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.

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.

He wondered what assumptions she was forming, what picture was emerging from this scant constellation of his life.

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.

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.