The Luminaries

by Eleanor Catton

Like most excessively beautiful persons, he had studied his own reflection minutely and, in a way, knew himself from the outside best; he was always in some chamber of his mind perceiving himself from the exterior.

Disdain was useful. It gave him a fixed sense of proportion, a rightfulness to which he could appeal, and feel secure.

In his life so far he had known only the kind of doubt that is calculated and secure. He had known only suspicion, cynicism, probability—never the fearful unraveling that comes when one ceases to trust in one’s own trusting power; never the dread panic that follows this unraveling; never the dull void that follows last of all.

(Suffering, he thought later, could rob a man of his empathy, could turn him selfish, could make him depreciate all other sufferers. This realization, when it came, surprised him.)

He was indulgent toward the open spaces of other men’s futures, but he was impatient with the shuttered quarters of their pasts.

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.

It often happens that when a soul under duress is required to attend to a separate difficulty, one that does not concern him in the least, then this second problem works upon the first as a kind of salve.

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 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.”