The Luminaries

by Eleanor Catton

(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. The appearance of cooperation was worth a great deal, if only because it forced a reciprocity, fair met with fair.

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

He saw that Balfour had offered friendship, and he had taken only assistance; that Balfour had offered kindness, and he had taken only the benefit of use.

Everywhere is a place,”

“You have not yet asked a question without presuming to answer it as well.”

Every spoke on the great wheel of luck was visible on a Saturday

though not openly prideful, he never showed that he was impressed or intimidated by any other man. He possessed a deeply private arrogance, a bedrock of self-certainty that needed neither proof nor explication—for although he had a warrior’s reputation, and an honorable standing within his tribe, his self-conception had not been shaped by his achievements. He simply knew that his beauty and his strength were without compare; he simply knew that he was better than most other men.

he tended to favor whichever proofs best pleased his sense of principle, and equally, to hold fast to whichever principles best lent themselves to proof.

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.

which was how he saw everyone whom he encountered: as reflections of, or detractions from, his own authentic self.

it’s unlucky to be lucky for long.

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

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

(How strange, Ah Sook thought later, that one’s gestures remain the same, even as the body changes, weathers, and gives itself over to age—as though the gestures were the real vessel, the vase to the body’s flower.

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

“Money is a burden,” said Ah Sook. This was a proverb he quoted often. “A burden that is felt most keenly by the poor,”

And what was a coincidence, Moody thought, but a stilled moment in a sequence that had yet to be explained?

We now look outward, through the phantasm of our own convictions: we see the world as we wish to perfect it, and we imagine dwelling there.

which only showed, Moody thought, that a man ought never to trust another man’s evaluation of a third man’s disposition. For human temperament was a volatile compound of perception and circumstance; Moody saw now that he could no more have extracted the true Shepard from Nilssen’s account of him than he could have extracted the true Nilssen from his portrayal of Shepard.

There was a heavy quality to his features, as though they had been hewn from some kind of mineral: something elemental and coarsely grained that would not polish, and that weighed a great deal.

a person’s fortune always changes in the telling of it.”

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, doorless, and mortared from within. These alterations come upon us irrevocably, as the hands of the clock-face come upon the hour.

“The best lawmen can enforce the law without a badge,”

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

“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.”

Solitude is a condition best enjoyed in company.”

“that’s very difficult to say—which to value higher. Honesty or loyalty. From a certain point of view one might say that honesty is a kind of loyalty—a loyalty to the truth…though one would hardly call loyalty a kind of honesty! I suppose that when it came down to it—if I had to choose between being dishonest but loyal, or being disloyal but honest—I’d rather stand by my men, or by my country, or by my family, than by the truth. So I suppose I’d say loyalty…in myself. But in others…in the case of others, I feel quite differently. I’d much prefer an honest friend to a friend who was merely loyal to me; and I’d much rather be loyal to an honest friend than to a sycophant. Let’s say that my answer is conditional: in myself, I value loyalty; in others, honesty.”

“Luck is never the whole picture,”

Astrology, like all meaning-making systems, can be wonderfully sustaining. But in order to countenance it, you have to let yourself be a little bit naïve.

but of course people only recognize themselves when they are willing to do so.