Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

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

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

"I wish to be able to call myself deserving of my lot,' Moody said carefully. 'Luck is by nature underserved."

"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 fees it always. Nagging. Nagging."

"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 its mooring, and, half-drowning, succumbs to a fearful tide. But addiction was not love; it could not be love. Gascoigne could not romanticize the purple shadows underneath her eyes, her wasted limbs, the dreamy disorientation with which she spoke; but even so, he thought, it was uncanny that opium's ruin could mirror love's raptures with such fidelity."

"Solitude is a condition best enjoyed in company."

"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—everyone together, sleeping in the dark.''I am afraid I am interrupting your solitude,' Anna"

"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, or lucky to go''I'd call it lucky to choose,' said Moody—surprising himself, for that was not the answer he would have given, three months prior."

"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 shoulder, Anna with one hand tucked beneath her cheek. She must have turned toward him, some time in the night: her left arm was flung outward, her fingers reaching, her palm turned down... Devlin came closer... He looked down at Anna and Emery, their mirrored bodies, facing in. They were breathing in t"

"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 said that love must be freely given, and freely taken, such that the lovers, in joining, make equal halves of something whole."

"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."

"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 to the dreamer, will now acquire the form and substance of the real. We were of our own making, and we shall be our own end. And after Pisces? Out of the womb, the bloody birth. We do not follow: we cannot cross from last to first. Aries will not admit a collective point of view, and Taurus will not relinquish the subjective. Gemini's code is an exclusive one. Cancer seeks a source, Leo, a purpose, and Virgo, a design; but these are projects undertaken singly. Only in the zodiac's second act will we begin to show ourselves: in Libra, as a notion, in Scorpio, as a quality, and in Sagittarius, as a voice. In Capricorn we will gain memory, and in Aquarius, vision; it is only in Pisces, the last and oldest of the zodiacal signs, that we acquire a kind of selfhood, something whole. But the doubled fish of Pisces, that mirrored womb of self and self-awareness, is an ourobouros of mind—both the will of fate, and the fated will—and the house of self-undoing is a prison built by prisoners, airless, door-less, and mortared from within. These alterations come upon us irrevocably, as the hands of the clock-face come upon the hour."

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

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

"But could he endure it, that other men knew her in a way that he, Staines, did not? He did not know."

"for Pop, who sees the starsand Jude, who hears their music"

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