Eleanor Catton Quotes

Having to think so much about fictitious relationships that work or don't work, and with each relationship between characters managing to do one or other of those in its own peculiar way, I spend a lot of time thinking about relationships, real and imagined.

At times I wonder whether or not your role as a member of Parliament... may in fact inhibit a relationship developing.

Every woman I've had a relationship with has found this maddening; the fact that I will talk about anything on the stage, and reveal all this stuff, and yet when I'm at home, I clam up and won't discuss anything intimate or personal.

You don't want to see me all the time. You get bored.

When you have an ensemble where characters pair off so easily, it becomes extremely isolating in the story world. You can end up with two actors who have not seen each other face to face all season long.

My wife has cut our lovemaking down to once a month, but I know two guys she's cut out entirely.

It's strange to be so physically close to someone who's so distant

When you're trying to get laid, everything's great, but once you've been with someone eight years and the future is not finite, you have time to sit and really examine every little thing that irritates you.

Women have an extraordinary ability to withdraw from the sexual relationship, to immunize themselves against it, in such a way that their men can be left feeling let down and insulted without having anything tangible to complain of.

We have a very good head thing but we don't make love.

If two lives join, there is oft a scar. They are one and one, with a shadowy third; One near one is too far.

Perhaps we had at last reached that stage of intimacy that destroys intimacy.

he knows too much about himself to subject her to a morning after, when he will be cold, surly, impatient to be alone.

Sometimes I get real lonely sleeping with you.

I knew I had to keep him to myself, as I'd slowly begun to keep everything. We had secrets now, truths and half-truths, that kept her always at arm's length, behind a closed door, miles away.

When you're with somebody for some years, sometimes you need a break from 'em. You grow in different directions.

He'd stopped trying to bring her back. She only came back when she felt like it anyway, in dreams and lies and broken-down deja-vu.

Wealth is a relational barrier. It keeps us from having open relationships.

If you can't be friends with a lover, then forget it. It's not going to work.

Without solitude, Love will not stay long by your side.

After the success of Buddenbrooks, he married and fathered six children. Yet the surviving diaries tell us of recurrent sexual problems - and of Katia Mann's extremely sympathetic response to them

I think that men think they need their man caves. They don't really do. They think they want them, and then the second they do get them and they have alone time and time away from the girl, and the girl is really cool with giving them alone time, then that's when they, or at least I, start to think, "So, why are you so cool with me being alone? What's wrong with me that you don't want to be with me every second."

They wordlessly excused each other for not loving each other as much as they had planned to. There were empty rooms in the house where they had meant to put their love, and they worked together to fill these rooms with midcentury modern furniture. ("Birthmark").

People grow apart, and sometimes, there nothing anyone can do about it.

As anyone who has received or dispensed psychotherapy knows, it's a profession whose mainspring is love. Nearly everyone who visits a therapist has a love disorder of one sort or another, and each has a story to tell - of love lost or denied, love twisted or betrayed, love perverted or shackled to violence. Broken attachments litter the office floors like pick-up sticks. People appear with frayed seams and spilling pockets.