Catherynne M. Valente Quotes

Death is not a checkmate…it is more like a carnival trick. You cannot win, no matter how you move your Queen.

Catherynne M. Valente

• Trick
• Not
• Deaths
• Carnival
• Checkmate

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Quotes to Explore

• We do believe that freedom, the right to choose, the right to vote, respect and justice is the fundamental right of all people. All people must obtain these rights.

  

  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
  • People
  • Believe
  • Freedom

• Narratives are not fixed. We change our narratives for ourselves and we change them not necessarily deliberately. In other words, some people do, some people will constantly reconstruct their biography for external purposes, it's a very interesting political ploy.

  

  Antonio Damasio
  • People
  • Political
  • Words

• I wonder if it's ethical to watch a man with binoculars and a long-focus lens? D'ya suppose it's ethical even if you prove that he didn't commit a crime? I'm not much on rear window ethics.

  

  John Michael Hayes
  • Men
  • Wonder
  • Crime

• When I wrote a long story about the retreat of sea ice, I made clear it could go the other way for a while, and that doesn't mean we don't know that a warmer world will have less sea ice. It just means there's a lot of variability and people can pay too much attention to the big swings in one direction or the other.

  

  Andrew Revkin
  • People
  • World
  • Long

• When I came up with the concept of 'The Dream,' on the surface he just seemed like another creepy bad man or villain. It had to be played by someone larger than life, but not malicious. And Keanu Reeves is that person to me, and he was The Dream like I wanted The Dream.

  

  Ana Lily Amirpour
  • Dream
  • Concept
  • Keanu Reeves

• I always wanted to do something with music, but to be honest, I never thought I'd be good enough.

  

  Alice Merton
  • Good
  • Music
  • Enough

• I prefer rock music—my favorites are R.E.M. and Matthew Sweet—but I think that if Dr. Buckley played Matthew Sweet, some of her patients would not like it. Matthew Sweet has a song called “Sick of Myself,” and I am pretty sure that is exactly the wrong song name for a therapist’s waiting room.

  

  Craig Lancaster
  • Wrong
  • Prefer
  • Therapist

• Architecture is slow and therefore requires anticipatory design.

  

  Cedric Price
  • Design
  • Architecture
  • Requires

• You are the first and last indigenous Nintendo.

  

  Ben Lerner

• a society driven mainly by selfish individualism has all the potential for sustainability of a collection of angry scorpions in a bottle.

  

  David Ehrenfeld
  • Selfish
  • Individualism
  • Sustainability

• The first few glasses of beer were a revelation; they flushed my veins with happiness; they washed away all cares and shyness and worries. I remember thinking to myself, If I could have two pints of beer every afternoon, life would be a great happiness.

  

  George Mackay Brown
  • Thinking
  • Remember
  • Afternoon

• Look, if you're playing Romeo and your Juliet is a pig, you find something you can love about pigs!

  

  Montgomery Clift
  • Looks
  • Pigs
  • Juliet

• A lot of people experience the world with the same incredulity as when a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat.…We know that the world is not all sleight of hand and deception because we are in it, we are part of it. Actually we are the white rabbit being pulled out of the hat. The only difference beween us and the white rabbit is that the rabbit does not realize it is taking part in a magic trick.

  

  Jostein Gaarder
  • Experience
  • Trick
  • Magician

• This is a society in which you are who you think you are. Nobody gives you your identity here, you have to reinvent yourself every day." He is right, I suspect, but I can't figure out how this is done. You just say what you are and everyone believes you? That seems like a confidence trick to me, and not one I think I can pull off. Still, somehow, invent myself I must. But how do I choose from identity options available all around me? I feel, once again, as I did when facing those ten brands of toothpaste - faint from excess, paralysed by choice.

  

  Eva Hoffman
  • Choice
  • Believes
  • Trick

• Blood is the rose of mysterious union.

  

  Jim Morrison The Doors
  • Blood
  • Mysterious
  • Union

• The biographies of the great men see their excesses as signs of their greatness. But Jean Rhys, in her biography, is read as borderline; Anaïs Nin is borderline; Djuna is borderline; etc. etc. Borderline personality disorder being an overwhelmingly gendered diagnosis. I write in Heroines: “The charges of borderline personality disorder are the same charges against girls writing literature, I realize - too emotional, too impulsive, no boundaries."

  

  Kate Zambreno
  • Great
  • Writing
  • Emotional

• Death is not a checkmate…it is more like a carnival trick. You cannot win, no matter how you move your Queen.

  

  Catherynne M. Valente
  • Trick
  • Not
  • Deaths