Memorable Quotations: Sagittarius Luminaries of the Past

A fun Kindle book of quotes for astrology fans. Memorable Quotations: Sagittarius Luminaries of the Past. Book Cover. By Carol A. Dingle. Memorable.
Table of contents

• The Luminaries Quotes
• Character Analysis
• Booker Prize Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries – extract - Telegraph

The twelve men congregated in the smoking room of the Crown Hotel gave the impression of a party accidentally met. From the variety of their comportment and dress — frock coats, tailcoats, Norfolk jackets with buttons of horn, yellow moleskin, cambric, and twill — they might have been twelve strangers on a railway car, each bound for a separate quarter of a city that possessed fog and tides enough to divide them; indeed, the studied isolation of each man as he pored over his paper, or leaned forward to tap his ashes into the grate, or placed the splay of his hand upon the baize to take his shot at billiards, conspired to form the very type of bodily silence that occurs, late in the evening, on a public railway — deadened here not by the slur and clunk of the coaches, but by the fat clatter of the rain.

Such was the perception of Mr. Walter Moody, from where he stood in the doorway with his hand upon the frame. He was innocent of having disturbed any kind of private conference, for the speakers had ceased when they heard his tread in the passage; by the time he opened the door, each of the twelve men had resumed his occupation rather haphazardly, on the part of the billiard players, for they had forgotten their places with such a careful show of absorption that no one even glanced up when he stepped into the room.

The strictness and uniformity with which the men ignored him might have aroused Mr.

As it was, he was queasy and disturbed. He had known the voyage to West Canterbury would be fatal at worst, an endless rolling trough of white water and spume that ended on the shattered graveyard of the Hokitika bar, but he had not been prepared for the particular horrors of the journey, of which he was still incapable of speaking, even to himself. Moody was by nature impatient of any deficiencies in his own person — fear and illness both turned him inward — and it was for this reason that he very uncharacteristically failed to assess the tenor of the room he had just entered.

Booker Prize winners since The Luminaries is gripping and virtuosic. Man Booker Prize win is 'awesome'. His grey eyes were large and unblinking, and his supple, boyish mouth was usually poised in an expression of polite concern. His hair inclined to a tight curl; it had fallen in ringlets to his shoulders in his youth, but now he wore it close against his skull, parted on the side and combed flat with a sweet-smelling pomade that darkened its golden hue to an oily brown. His brow and cheeks were square, his nose straight, and his complexion smooth. He was not quite eight-and-twenty, still swift and exact in his motions, and possessed of the kind of roguish, unsullied vigour that conveys neither gullibility nor guile.

He presented himself in the manner of a discreet and quick-minded butler, and as a consequence was often drawn into the confidence of the least voluble of men, or invited to broker relations between people he had only lately met. He had, in short, an appearance that betrayed very little about his own character, and an appearance that others were immediately inclined to trust.

Moody was not unaware of the advantage his inscrutable grace afforded him. 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.

He had passed a great many hours in the alcove of his private dressing room, where the mirror tripled his image into profile, half-profile, and square: It was a private practice, and one he would likely have denied — for how roundly self-examination is condemned, by the moral prophets of our age! In his fascination Moody sought less to praise his own beauty than to master it. Certainly whenever he caught his own reflection, in a window box, or in a pane of glass after nightfall, he felt a thrill of satisfaction — but as an engineer might feel, chancing upon a mechanism of his own devising and finding it splendid, flashing, properly oiled and performing exactly as he had predicted it should.

He could see his own self now, poised in the doorway of the smoking room, and he knew that the figure he cut was one of perfect composure. He was near trembling with fatigue; he was carrying a leaden weight of terror in his gut; he felt shadowed, even dogged; he was filled with dread. He surveyed the room with an air of polite detachment and respect. It had the appearance of a place rebuilt from memory after a great passage of time, when much has been forgotten andirons, drapes, a proper mantel to surround the hearth but small details persist: Beyond this vague periphery, one could see sagging laundry lines running back and forth behind the houses one block to the east, latticed stacks of raw timber, pigpens, piles of scrap and sheet iron, broken cradles and flumes — everything abandoned, or in some relative state of disrepair.

The clock had struck that late hour of twilight when all colours seem suddenly to lose their richness, and it was raining hard; through the cockled glass the yard was bleached and fading. But Moody was not a man for whom offending standards were cause enough to sulk: 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, door-less, and mortared from within.

These alterations come upon us irrevocably, as the hands of the clock-face come upon the hour. She must have turned toward him, some time in the night: He looked down at Anna and Emery, their mirrored bodies, facing in. They were breathing in tandem. So they are lovers , he thought, looking down at them.

Character Analysis

So they are lovers, after all. He knew it from the way that they were sleeping. But is it love, when it is unrequited? Of course I have wished for it, very much—but they were vain wishes; the kind one makes in twilight states, you know, idly. I remember just what you said, as we rounded the heads of the harbor—in the dawn light. I have thought of it many times, since; it was the most delightfully original of speeches.

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Dawn is such a private hour, don't you think? Such a solitary hour. One always hears that said of midnight, but I think of midnight as remarkably companionable—everyone together, sleeping in the dark.

Solitude is best enjoyed in company. But I love to enjoy the feeling when I'm not.

I know it, just the same. Why, that's like overlooking Hanover, or—or Plantagenet. Staines is quite the philosopher, Miss Wetherell. After you've dug yourself a patch, and made yourself a pile? Staines to love you very much, don't you, Miss Wetherell?

Without love, we cannot be ourselves. Yes, he understood Anna Wetherell at long last, but it was not a happy understanding. Devlin had known many women of poor prospects and limited means, whose only transport out of the miserable cage of their unhappy circumstance was the flight of the fantastic.