Birnam Wood Quotes

“Every little thing now has to be about maximising your potential, and perfecting yourself, and honing yourself, and getting the best deal out of your life, and out of your body, and out of your precious fucking time. Everything’s a corporate retreat now. Everything has utility. You want to get fucked up and just escape your own existence for once, just check out of your life for a while, like every other human being who has ever lived? No. Even a fucking acid trip has to be a means to an end. It has to be about team-building. It has to be about trust and wellness and creativity. It has to be about your authentic journey towards physical and psychological perfection. It has to be about you asserting the integrity of your choice to do it in the first place. It can’t be a lapse of judgment. There are no lapses of judgment. It can’t be wrong. There are no wrongs. There’s just choice, and choice is neutral, and we’re neutral, and everything is neutral, and everything’s a game, and if you want to win the game then you’re going to have to optimise yourself, and actualise yourself, and utilise yourself, and get the edge, and God forbid that you should have an actual human experience of frailty, or mortality, or limitation, or humanity, or of the fucking onward march of time--those are just distractions, those are obstacles, they’re defects, they’re inconveniences in the face of our curated, bespoke, freely fucking chosen authentic existence, and sure, we can never quite decide if we’re the consumers of our lives or the products of them, but there’s one thing we are damn sure of, which is that nobody on earth has any right to pass any judgment on us, either way. Freedom in the marketplace! It’s the only thing that matters! It’s the only thing that exists!”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

“...the real choices that you make in your life, the really difficult, defining choices are never between what's right and what's easy. They're between what's wrong and what's hard.”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

“Democracy isn’t about everyone voting the exact same way, it’s about whether you agree to go along with the outcome of the vote even if it turns out you’re in the minority. That’s consensus.”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

“Mira was scowling. It annoyed her, almost as a matter of principle, that anyone of this man's age, race, gender, wealth, and associated privilege should have used his power--allegedly--for good, should have built his business--allegedly--up from the ground, from nothing, and should possess--allegedly--the very kind of rural authenticity that she herself most envied and pursued. Even more annoying was the fact that she had never heard of the orange-fronted parakeet, which she now searched for, still scowling, in a separate tab. Like all self-mythologising rebels, Mira preferred enemies to rivals, and often turned her rivals into enemies, the better to disdain them as secret agents of the status quo. But because this was not a conscious habit, she experienced only a vague feeling of righteous defiance as, unable to dismiss Owen Darvish, she told herself instead that she disliked him.”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

“There’s something so joyless about the left these days,’ Tony continued, ‘so forbidding and self-denying. And policing. No one’s having any fun, we’re all just sitting around scolding each other for doing too much or not enough--and it’s like, what kind of vision for the future is that? Where’s the hope? Where’s the humanity? We’re all aspiring to be monks when we could be aspiring to be lovers.”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

“... his future, had either been sold or laid to waste by his parents' generation, trapping him in a perpetual adolescence that was further heightened by the infantilising unreality of the Internet as it encroached upon, and colonised, real life - 'real life', Tony thought, with bitter air quotes, for late capitalism would admit nothing 'real' beyond the logic of late capitalism itself, having declared self-interest the only universal, and profit motive the only absolute, and deriding everything that did not serve its ends as either a contemptible weakness or a fantasy.”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

“He would expose, remorselessly, those hypocrites and cynics who publicly denied the catastrophe of climate change while secretly short-selling that very same position and hedging all their bets; the millionaires and billionaires who preached self-reliance while accepting vast handouts in the form of subsidies and easy credit, and who bemoaned red tape while building contractual fortresses to shield their capital from their ex-wives; the tax-dodging economic parasites who treated state treasuries like casinos and dismantled welfare programmes out of spite, who secured immensely lucrative state contracts through illegitimate back channels and grubby, endlessly revolving doors, who eroded civil standards, who demolished social norms, and whose obscene fortunes had been made, in every case, on the back of institutions built with public funding, enriched by public patronage, and rightfully belonging to the public, most notably, the fucking Internet; the confirmed sociopaths who were literally vampiric with their regular transfusions of younger, healthier blood; the cancerous polluters who consumed more, and burned more, and wasted more than half the world’s population put together; the crypto-fascist dirty tricksters who pretended to be populists while defrauding and despising the people, who lied with impunity, who stole with impunity, who murdered with impunity, who invented scapegoats, who incited suicides, who encouraged violence and provoked unrest, and who then retreated into a private sphere of luxury so well insulated from the lives of ordinary people, and so well defended against them, that it basically amounted to a form of secession.”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

“that only something that a person didn’t want to see in print was news, and everything else was advertising.”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

“But she was not unaware that there was a certain satisfaction to be found in hopelessness, a certain piety, a touch of martyrdom, in feeling oneself and one’s entire generation to have been wronged by those in power, and deceived, and discouraged from civic participation, and robbed, and made fun of, and maligned;”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

“I was just going to remark that being a cliché can be very useful. You ought to consider it sometime.'

'Oh yeah?'

'Yeah,' he said. 'It means people underestimate you. They think they've seen all there is to see. They drop their guard. They get lazy. They reveal themselves.'

‘Thanks for the tip,’ she said, ‘but I’m a woman; I’m underestimated, like, every day of my life.”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

“...wondering, not for the first time, when exactly she had become so technologically dependent that her first instinct in every unpredicted circumstance was to outsource her imagination to her phone.”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

“he had found himself increasingly at odds with the prevailing orthodoxies of the contemporary feminist left, which seemed to him to have abandoned the worthy goal of equality between the sexes in pursuit of either naked self-interest or revenge. He could not accept a worldview whose terms he was not allowed to question, and he resented the caricature of power and entitlement that he was forever being told that he embodied, automatically and absolutely, no matter what his intentions were, and no matter what he felt or thought, or even did;”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

“Like all self-mythologising rebels, Mira preferred enemies to rivals, and often turned her rivals into enemies, the better to disdain them as secret agents of the status quo.”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

“She went into the smaller of the bedrooms and shut the door and climbed under the covers and lay wishing she was brave enough to kill herself as the sun traversed the sky above the ranges and filled the room with slanting yellow light.”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

“One of the reasons that horticulture held such strong appeal for Mira was that it offered her a respite from this habit of relentless interior critique. When she made things grow, she experienced a kind of manifest forgiveness, an abiding moving-on and making-new that she found impossible in almost every other sphere of life.”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

“(Nor was Shelley’s dad of any interest to Mira as an adversary. He was a mortgage broker with an irritable disposition who was always, in the family parlance, ‘in a rage’--an infirmity openly encouraged, as Mira pointed out, by his wife, who indeed devoted an unusual proportion of her daily conversation to reminding her husband of the many kinds of people in the world whom he disliked. That this list, which included vegans, slow walkers, loudmouths, ostentatious breast-feeders, people of indeterminate gender, buskers, bad drivers, and the unwashed, covered in one way or another the entire membership of Birnam Wood, Mira did not appear to find insulting. She saw Shelley’s father as a creature of his wife’s devising, not an autonomous adult, but a hapless pawn designed by Mrs Noakes for the solitary purpose of throwing her own, more vivid personality into greater relief--a plainly narcissistic exercise of which she, Mira, could not remotely see the appeal.)”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

“perspicacity,”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

“The Gallos had always kept a frugal household, and it hadn’t been until Tony went abroad that he realised that what he had always taken to be middle class was really, by any global standard, rich. The revelation had produced in him not relief or gratitude, but a new and deeply unpleasant sense of his own complicity, for Grandpa Gallo's legacy--a fortune he had never known existed, let alone expected to receive--had left him suddenly much wealthier than any of his friends. He had never mentioned the bequest to anyone; instead, he practised inconspicuous consumption, and began to cultivate a shabby hand-me-down appearance as a way of implying to everyone around him that, like them, he was only barely scraping by. It was partly to atone for this deception, and partly in continuation of it, that he had turned to journalism; having pretended for so long that the asceticism of his lifestyle was a sacrifice he had no other option but to make, he now felt an almost desperate desire to earn an income from his writing, and thereby prove in concrete terms that his life’s project, the expansion of his mind, was more than what he feared it might be--merely a form of inauthentic tourism financed, hypocritically, by those very social and economic structures that he claimed so energetically to oppose.”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

“conversation on the left these days, it’s always so competitive, it’s always each person trying to outperform the person before them in terms of their oppression or their lack of privilege or their personal trauma or, like, the fact that actually they’re Jewish or actually they’re bisexual, or guess what, they’re a quarter this or that ethnicity, which gives them the right to speak or the right to take offence or whatever. It’s a marketplace! Yet again! You can dress it up in the language of sensitivity and social justice and blah blah blah, but the point of intersectionality isn’t to learn how to transcend our differences, or eliminate them, the point isn’t solidarity, it’s about shoring up your brand, cornering the market, everyone out for themselves, maximising profit and minimising risk—”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

“Mira’s ambition had a limit. She wanted to suffer for the things that she’d done wrong, not to get away with them, and bury them, and profit from them, and triumph over them, and shame the world by her success like him”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

“Lemoine loved to make a study of deceptions, no matter how insignificant or glancing they might seem; in fact, he had often found it was the inconsequential-seeming falsehoods that tended to betray the most about a person’s character, exposing their petty vanities, their hubris, their blind spots and soft spots and individual styles of self-mythology and self-exception,”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

“and one of the activities they encouraged at the mental hospital was building miniature dioramas. Because everything’s so small, you see. It’s manageable. You hold the figures in your hand. You can see the whole scene. You have perspective. It’s a kind of therapy.”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

“And we’ll be, like, uploading our memories to the cloud.’ ‘Not just uploading them. Changing them.’ ‘Putting filters on.’ ‘Yeah, we’ll basically merge with our phones.’ ‘Like a Black Mirror episode.’ ‘Let’s face it,’ Natalie said, ‘that show is essentially a documentary.”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

“In Shelley’s time at university, she had contributed a regular book review to the English department’s student magazine, and whenever she had run out of time before the deadline, or whenever the book in question had been too difficult or too politically contentious for her to know how to describe her own response to it not only truthfully, but responsibly as well, she had always taken refuge in excessive praise. People were always quick to criticise an act of criticism, and anybody could dismiss as lazy what professed to be lukewarm, but nobody tended to ask any questions of a gush. Even people who’d despised whatever book she happened to be praising never quarrelled with her if she really, truly rhapsodised about it; they simply wrote her off as a person with poor taste and stopped engaging with her critically, and that was that. The stakes had never been particularly high, of course; but even so, she still felt pained sometimes when she leafed through the back issues of the magazine and saw that all her most lavishly complimentary reviews had been of books whose authors frightened her, books she never finished, or books she’d been too cowardly to admit she didn’t understand. With typical self-deprecation, she had been sure that she was quite alone in giving rein to this particular form of intellectual dishonesty, and so she had been surprised, several years into her time at Birnam Wood, to realise that one of the clearest signs that Mira was practising deception of some kind was when she began agreeing with everything that Shelley said.”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

“Like, no one ever actually knows what the right thing to do is. I mean, you can think that you know what’s right, and you can tell yourself that you know, but at the point that you make your choice, like, in the moment, you’re never really certain. You just hope. You just act and you hope for the best, and maybe it turns out that you did the right thing, or maybe it turns out that you didn’t–in which case, all you can say is that at least you tried. But, like, the wrong thing to do, that’s often much clearer. Wrong is, like, easier to see than right, a lot of the time. It’s more definite–like, this is the line I know I will not cross, this is what I absolutely will not do.”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

“Sorry if that’s a silly question–it’s just that in my line of work, it’s easy sometimes to mistake an innocent omission for a cover-up.”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

“But to his astonishment, Mira hadn’t been at all chastised. She’d shot back that anyone could drop a name, but this idea was hers; she’d come up with it on her own, having never heard of Rawls, and having never felt she needed to. How could an original idea be out of date? That was a contradiction in terms, a category error.”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

“and anyway, between the two of them, wasn’t he the one who was more guilty of propping up the status quo by shooting her ideas down and dropping names of dead philosophers as if that was in any way a legitimate response to anything any more–and why was it that people on the left were always talking about who was actually on the left–wasn’t that kind of out of date?”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

“One of the many things that a career in covert monitoring had taught Lemoine was that in most circumstances, nothing attracted more attention than somebody attempting to blend in. A far better form of camouflage was to choose a costume that conformed to some blatant stereotype and then to wear it openly, deliberately courting judgment and inviting bias, until general opinion had been fixed; after that, one could virtually do as one pleased, for while people were quick to form opinions, they were just as slow to change them, and–to rephrase the aphorism slightly–there were none so blind as those who had already decided what it was they saw.”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood

“As long as you keep treating the individual as the basis of political agency,’ he was saying now, ‘you’re going to be stuck with different forms of capitalism. This is my whole idea. This is what I’m trying to write about. What if we stopped talking in terms of individuals at all, and instead we took the relationship as the base socio-economic unit? The relationships, the bonds, the connections–they’re just as basic to any system as the actual individuals, the actual data. Right? And in relationships, we do all sorts of things that radically challenge the neoliberal status quo: we make sacrifices, we put the other person first, we learn to compromise, we care, we help, we listen, we give ourselves away–and fundamentally, those are different kinds of sacrifices to the kind that are all about self-discipline and following a regime. They’re not individualistic; they’re mutual. Like, all the stuff that you were saying before, stopping eating meat, flying less, shopping local, I mean, all power to you, for sure, but there’s something so puritanical about it, like, it’s a programme of asceticism, always being strict and consistent and never being lazy or whatever–and at the end of the day it’s still about you as an individual. Your purity, your moral conscience, the sacrifices you’ve made.”
― Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood