Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless Quotes
You are going to break your promise. I understand. And I hold my hands over the ears of my heart, so that I will not hate you.
You will always fall in love, and it will always be like having your throat cut, just that fast.
Just tell yourself a story that'll satisfy you and pretend he told it.
And as we watched, the Tsar of Death lifted up his eyelids like skirts and began to dance in the streets of Leningrad.
Just remember that the only question in a house is who is to rule. The rest is only dancing around that, trying not to look it in the eye.
It was at thirteen years old that Marya Morevna learned how to keep a secret, and that secrets are jealous things, permitting no fraternization.
Everyone is a criminal! We are beset on all sides by antirevolutionary forces. Naturally, then, humans fall into three categories: the criminal, the not-yet-criminal, and the not-yet-caught.
I know you loved both he and I, the way a mother can love two sons. And no one should be judged for loving more than they ought, only for loving not enough.
No, not like this, when I have not seen you without your skin on, when I know nothing, when I am not safe. Not you, whose name all my nightmares know.
She was not filled up with the sight of him, the way she had seen her sisters fill up, like silk balloons, like wineskins. Instead, he seemed to land heavily within her, like a black stone falling.
In both marriage and war you must cut up the things people say like a cake and eat only what you can stomach.
First, the avid student must be aware that when the world was young it knew only seven things: water, life and death, salt, night, birds and the length of an hour.
War is not for winning, Masha, " sighed Koschei, reading the tracks of supply lines, of pincer strategies, over her shoulder. "It is for surviving.
The ghosts will eat everything because the bellies of ghosts want the whole world, just to fill one tiny corner.
I will age for you, if it pleases you. I will match you, wrinkle for wrinkle, grey hair for grey hair, crease for crease, wrinkle for wrinkle. You will be so beautiful when you are old.
Why should he be spared?''Someone ought to be.' And it will not be me. I have survived, but I have not been spared.
Life is like that. Death sweeps it away. That's what death is for. That's why they keep telling this story. It's the only story.
I thought that for a long while, but you chose me, and then you chose him, and choosing is hard - one choice is never the end of the story.
it is better to be strong and cruel than to be fair. At least, one eats better that way. And morality is more dependent on the state of one's stomach than of one's nation
there is only this world, as it is now, and there has never been another, can never be any other.
I have to know, I have to or else you will just rule me until the end of everything because you know and I do not.
I ate all of my husbands. First I ate their love, then their will, then their despair, and then I made pies of their bodies - and those bodies were so dear to me!