The Luminaries

by Eleanor Catton

deprecation always waits to be disputed, and, if the disputation does not come, becomes petulance.

you can’t tell what a fellow really looks like, you know, without animation. Without his soul.’

Whenever he behaved badly, or questionably, he simply jettisoned the memory, and turned his mind to something else.

Every spoke on the great wheel of luck was visible on a Saturday—there were men rising, risen, just falling, fallen, and at rest—and that night every digger would either drink his sorrow, or his joy.

‘I understand the question,’ Tauwhare said. He understood that Balfour was asking about the death of Crosbie Wells, and yet had not been present at his funeral—that shameful excuse for a funeral, Tauwhare thought, with a flash of anger and disgust. He understood that Balfour had made only the most superficial show of sympathy, and had not even removed his hat. He understood that Balfour was looking to make a profit in some way, for he had a greedy look, in the way that men often did when they saw a chance to receive something and give nothing in return. Yes, Tauwhare thought: he understood the question.

He wrapped his coat around his body, turned on his heel, and began walking towards the Hokitika spit—a place that was, for him, a habitual refuge. It was his pleasure to stand on the sand in foul weather, clutch his coat across his body, and look out past the clustered masts of the ships at anchor, swaying en masse, impelled variously by the river’s rushing current, the surf, and the wind—the howling Tasman wind, that stripped the bark from the trees at the beachfront, and bent the scrub to crippled forms.

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

He was by natural faculty and self-styling a Renaissance man, accustomed to showing immediate promise in whatever field to which he applied himself; if he did not master a trick on his first attempt, he gave up the trade.

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.

He became the man whom she rejected because she rejected him, because she left.

But onward also rolls the outer sphere—the boundless present, which contains the bounded past.

a feature of human nature to give what we most wish to receive,

He painted a very feeble picture whenever he spoke about himself, a practice that was humorously meant, but that belied, nevertheless, an excessively vulnerable self-conception.