Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
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You know how questing goes. You can’t explain it to anyone else; it would be like telling them your dreams.
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Life outraces memory.
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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.
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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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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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Being on time is a filthy habit practised only by roosters and retirees.
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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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You're grown - crooked and backbent, but grown - and it's time to stop hanging your heart on your mother.
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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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A mother's like a poison made for only one soul.
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The colours of the glass throw blue and green onto her wet cheeks. The sea wind picks up her hair violet electrics snap and sparkle between the strands.
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The Sirens flicked their wings at the wall, inscribing it with their own blue ink: Even in penance is beauty; blessed are all the ocean’s drowned!
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A labyrinth, when it is big enough, is just the world.
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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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Be nice to Fairyland. She is old and tender of heart and when her feelings are hurt, she cries volcanoes.
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She drank like a Czar and sang like a broken squeezebox and danced like the Sugarplum Fairy cutting loose at last
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She wasn’t angry. You can’t get angry just because the world’s so much bigger than you and you’re stuck 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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Decibel Jones sighed and shook his head. Today was fired. Today was well and truly sacked. Today could, in point of fact, fuck all the way off.
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It tasted like a shade of white near blue; it tasted like the idea of pearls; it tasted like a memory nearly grasped but lost at the last moment.
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Old things have strange hungers.
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Oh, quit that. Blushing is for virgins and Christians.
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I belong in the refrigerator. Because the truth is, I'm just food for a superhero. He'll eat up my death and get the energy he needs to become a legend.
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Sometimes I worry. Worrying is defined as obsessive examination of one’s own code.