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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I am the plague which will burn through the marrow of the Anointed City.
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Nobody came without their sequins roaring.
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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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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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Perhaps my philosophy is not so sophisticated. It goes: Come inside. I love you. A Whelk's love will grow as big as it's allowed.
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When I grew a little older, and had suitors, I demanded from them rings from the bottom of the sea, or a sword from the depths of the desert, or a golden bough and a thick golden fleece, too, before I allowed even one kiss.
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But the Tsar of Death and the Tsar of Life greatly feared one another, for Death is surrounded by souls, and is never lonely, and the Tsar of Life had hidden his death away in a place deeper than secrets, and more secret than depth.
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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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I've come to think you only get so much bravery in one lifetime and if you spend it too soon, you're all out of fuck it all to hell by the time you really need it.
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It's easier to use somebody if you can think of them as mute and dumb and made for your pleasure.
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…but she does not know whom she wishes to catch, only that she wishes to catch someone, anyone, to be anchored, to be connected, to not be abandoned.
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You can't fix a bad man like a bad staircase.
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Sweet as cherries, bright as berries, light of my moony sky.
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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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Don't worry, my little lump of rock. Everybody gets a chance to choose. Or else where would irony come from?
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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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So you don’t love him. Why would you look for love with a man? How could a man ever understand you?
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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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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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Tell it fast before you get scared and silence yourself. You’ll never wish you’d held back a little more.
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In both marriage and war you must cut up the things people say like a cake and eat only what you can stomach.
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Snow White gets a Social Security card. She gets a job building houses out in California. Picks oranges.
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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.