Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
I'm gonna be good at something other than marrying, darlings. Besides, I don't want them. I don't even wanna screw them, how am I gonna marry them?
It's a dreadful world with only your own heart to drive you.
I got a heart like a half bottle of no-label whiskey.Nothing to brag on, but enough for you, and all your friends, too.
A book is a door into another place and another heart and another world.
But the trick most folk are so awfully fond of learning, the absolute second they've got hold of a heart, is to pretend they don't have one at all. It is the very first danger of the hearted.
I expect everyone in Boston has something like that ring, which is why I am glad I have never been to Boston.
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.
And hell, sometimes the best thing is to put on a black dress and become a wicked stepmother. There’s power in that, if you’re after power.
Let me tell you something, kid, " said Mrs. H of Boston and Beacon Hill. "Magic is just a word for what's left to the powerless once everyone else has eaten their fill.
there is only this world, as it is now, and there has never been another, can never be any other.
you have to have the right sort of stone. Peridot for mothers, girasol for lovers, sapphire for sadness, and garnet for joy.
No one belongs when they are new to this world. All children are Changelings.
Buck up, baby blowfish. Just puff up bigger than your sadness and scare it right off. That's the only way to live in the awful old ocean.
You can't trust just any old person who comes along with a hundred puffins and a pretty face!
The burnt-off connectors and shadows where Ravan once filled my spaces— those, I think, are the sensations of grief.
This is not a lie: Memory has the taste and texture of cooked meat. Eat it and live. Remember, but only what it is licit to remember.In Aerograd, the word for meat and memory are the same.
Memory is like that. It alters itself so that girlsare always trapped under the earth, waiting in the dark.
Perhaps memory is a thing that everyone involved has to work at, like stitching up a big quilt out of everything that ever happened to you.
Everyone has their invisible cloak of all things past.
That is the trouble with standing up to people, of course. Once you start doing it, you can hardly stop.
Sometimes, magic is like that. It lands on your head like a piano, a stupid, ancient, unfunny joke, and you spend the rest of your life picking sharps and flats out of your hair.
Magic has a logic, like algebra. Once you get to know it, it's easy. If this, then that. You write with a pencil, you don't make frog soup with it.
All Librarians are Secret Masters of Severe Magic. Goes with the territory.
A Bank is but a college of Fiscal Magic.
Music has more rules than math or magic and it's twice as dangerous as both or either.
Be my friend and love me, for the world is terrible lonely and I am sad.
But cheating has always been the purview of fairies, and as we are about to enter their domain, we ought to act in accordance with local customs.
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
...the villagers had decided that 'practical' meant 'extremely magical and full of interesting objects' and had officially subtitled themselves, Winesap: A Pracktical Towne.
I abandoned her. It's the one capital crime of fatherhood. Mothers can fail a thousand different ways. A father's only job is: do not abandon this child.
She was ... unhappy. It was part of her, you could not separate her from it. She was sad the way a horse is strong or a bird flies.
You get the face you build your whole life, with work and loving and grieving and laughing and frowning.
Don't worry, my little lump of rock. Everybody gets a chance to choose. Or else where would irony come from?
She had a highly developed sense of humor which in some lights looked a bit like a sense of justice.
The oligarchs do not care what justice is, only what seems just. They do not care what mercy is, only what appears merciful. Thus justice and mercy will always escape them.
It's Survival of Them Who's Best at Nicking Things, girl!
Everything in this place was livid and lurid and living, and when he loved her and hurt her all at once she lived, too, higher and harder than she had thought she could.
Stories, ' the green-eyed Sigrid said, unperturbed, 'are like prayers. It does not matter when you begin, or when you end, only that you bend a knee and say the words.
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.
The Heart of Fairyland is a story, " she said, and she felt so warm and light and full of rightness of it that she thought she might faint.
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.
Still life is boring. Never stand still! Jumping bean life!
September drank in the starry sky with a longing and a tugging and a sigh. All the way up, to that enormous crescent in the black.
Why should he be spared?''Someone ought to be.' And it will not be me. I have survived, but I have not been spared.
I am here to tell youWe are all of us just as mighty as planets—and you too, We'll let you in, we've got stalwart to spare—But you might have to sleep on the floor.
Storytelling can save you. Both the telling and the listening.