Catherynne M. Valente Quotes

The smell of loving is a difficult one to describe, but if you think of the times when someone has held you close and made you safe, you will remember how it smells just as well as I do.

Magic does that. It wastes you away. Once it grips you by the ear, the real world gets quieter and quieter, until you can hardly hear it at all.

And if they thought her aimless, if they thought her a bit mad, let them. It meant they left her alone. Marya was not aimless, anyway. She was thinking.

Close up your head; your brain is getting loose.

Her heart ached as though a knife had quietly slipped between her ribs.

Fierce was her needle, and she wore it like a sword.

The future is a messy, motley business, little girl.

The storm ate up September’s cry of despair, delighted at its mischief, as all storms are.

Marya pinned out her childhood like a butterfly. She considered it the way a mathematician considers an equation.

War is not for winning, Masha," sighed Koschei, reading the tracks of supply lines, of pincer strategies, over her shoulder. "It is for surviving.

...her cry is a hook and it catches me in the throat.

What is the world but a boxing ring where fools and devils put up their fists?

Well, very splendid and very frightening. But splendid things are often frightening. Sometimes, it's the fright that makes them splendid at all.

I believe we have an utterly unique specimen on our hands: a child who listens.

That’s what a map is, you know. Just a memory.

You humans, you know, whoever built you sewed irony into your sinews.

…everything has a narrative, really, and if you can’t understand a story and relate to it, figure out how you fit inside it, you’re not really alive at all.

We all have someone we think shines so much more than we do that we are not even a moon to their sun, but a dead little rock floating in space next to their gold and their blaze.

Whenever one does extraordinary things, someone is bound to try to repeat them for themselves. It's the way of the world.

I hope, in years to come, I shall hold my heart up and it will be a pane of clear glass, through which I see all, but nothing is distorted.

No one is now what they were before the war. There’s just no getting any of it back.

At the snowy summit of all these things, however, is the fact that you simply cannot go about locking your siblings in towers when they misbehave. It is unseemly and betrays a sad lack of creativity.

Oh, quit that. Blushing is for virgins and Christians.

Love rarely waits for permission.

Don’t worry,” Marya whispered, kissing his forehead. “My old bones will follow yours soon enough.

He tried to reconstruct the story in his mind, but it kept getting confused, bleeding into itself like watercolors.

You know how we can be about things which sparkle and shine. We imagine they will put back something of what has been lost.

I am the Walker and the Maze.

Death stands behind every bride, every groom.

Respect me. Be proud, and if you love me, a little afraid, because love so often looks like fear. We are alike. We are alike.

She felt as she often did in class when she was nearly sure she had the right answer, but could not always make herself raise her hand.

In his own country, Death can be kind.

Do you know, Masha, how revelation comes? Like death. So sudden, though you knew all along it must occur. A revelation is always the end of something. It might even be cause for grief.

There is no such thing as a people who are all wicked or even all good. Everyone chooses. But even they, even they looked at people and saw only tools. No one is a cup for another to drink from.

A labyrinth, when it is big enough, is just the world.

You cannot escape where you come from, September. Some part of it remains inside you always, like the slender white heart in the center of the thickest onion.

Woman! Come out! I have—" She looked down at the bloodless grass, embarrassed. "I have come to rescue you," she finally said, as if admitting that she were covered in boils.

I burn, I freeze; I am never warm. I am rigid; I forgot softness because it did not serve me.

Family is a transitive property.

He missed you like a fish in a bowl misses the open sea.

It's Latin, which is an excellent language for mischief-making, which is why governments are so fond of it.

War is not for winning, Masha, " sighed Koschei, reading the tracks of supply lines, of pincer strategies, over her shoulder. "It is for surviving.

However unlikely it may seem, it is the truth and, therefore, one hundred percent likely.

War must always be done out of sight, it shocks people and they stop immediately.

So a half-breed goatsnake, a Yith, and a Ghast walk into a bar.

Nothing real is pretty, she said. Only a doll is pretty. And a pretty doll drinks out of a tiny cup forever. A woman wants a big cup.

Trouble is, most times, when you go looking to sell your soul, nobody's buying.

A body can only deliver up the truth its bones know, Its blood, which is its history.

I thought: this is how you make a human being. A human being is beautiful and sick. A human being glitters and starves.

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!