Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
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How long your hair has grown. You could strangle a man in it.
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You have to be able to see the world as a whole to bear it - to see the Queerness that moves in every bit of Fairyland, how it threads through every heart and field, how we are all bound together up in the Weird Well of the World.
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I still want to kiss you. To feel the life in you seize on the life in me. Raw and fresh and new.
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The future is a messy, motley business, little girl.
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I have all the books I could need, and what more could I need than books? I shall only engage in commerce if books are the coin.
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In my mind I know the name of an ocean the size of everything that was. My mouth can only call it death.
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That is the trouble with standing up to people, of course. Once you start doing it, you can hardly stop.
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Perhaps all a Tsaritsa is is a beautiful cold girl in the snow, looking down at someone wretched, and not yielding.
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There a difference between having been coded to present a vast set of standardized responses to certain human facial, vocal, and linguistic states and having evolved to exhibit response B to input A in order to bring about a desired social result?
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September waited. She long ago learned that if she waited and blinked and behaved like a pupil, eventually someone would lecture her on something.
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"Don't trust metaphors," the wombat snorted. "If you let things start claiming to mean other things, there's no limit on how many things they can mean!"
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She must protect herself. There would be no one to do it for her. A plan started to prick up its ears inside her, slowly, but getting stronger.
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The best way to be the kind of girl you want to be is to do what that girl would do.
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When you are this hungry, you cannot even remember who you used to be, she whispered. Who you might have been, if not for the hunger.
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And that is the last lesson of childhood: You spend all your years fighting against the injustice of big folk and their big rules until you are ready to rule yourself.
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The Glasshobs built it to keep an eye on the stars, who have a tendency to run off on adventures and forget about how much we down-below folks need to navigate and cast horoscopes and meet lovers on balconies.
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I began my life as a character in my father's films.
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This is what comes of having a heart, even a very small and young one. It causes no end of trouble, and that’s the truth.
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She was determined that I hold this thing inside me like a heart - something irremovable and constant.
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War is not for winning, Masha," sighed Koschei, reading the tracks of supply lines, of pincer strategies, over her shoulder. "It is for surviving.
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Will Hilt to hand yet be restored? Take me up, thy mother's sword.
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We must not dwell on what we were in our salad days when soup days steam now upon the table!
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Death is not a checkmate…it is more like a carnival trick. You cannot win, no matter how you move your Queen.
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Nobody came without their sequins roaring.