Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
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Who knows what wild things Sleeping Beauty dreamt of while waiting to awake?
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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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After so long keeping to herself and tending her secret quietly, all these words just bubbled up out of her her like cool golden champagne.
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Everything good in the world has feathers and wings and claws.
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She’s an Italian flag in occupied territory, and I fall for her like Paris.
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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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Every cat knows how to keep his owner feeding them: You may scratch and bite ninety-nine times, but the hundredth time, you must leap into a lap and press your nose to their nose. Rules are for dogs.
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The dead know how to savor as the living never can.
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Surely you didn't think deathless meant dickless.
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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 heard there’s fire in hell, but I’ll bet the devil just hands you a bucket and tells you to get moving, this place ain’t gonna clean itself.
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When the world loses its fucking mind and turns on you like a stupid feral cat you thought was tame, it happens. Everyone does the long, woozy whistle, and keel over.
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She was a vengeful goddess and her will was absolute.
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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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The hinterlands. Where the criminals and the carnivals and the concatenating counterfeiters of no morals to speak of make a home.
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Never assume that a woman is wicked simply because she is ugly and behaves unfavorably towards you. It is unbecoming behavior for a Prince.
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Children make prayers so thoughtlessly, building them up like sand castles - and they are always surprised when suddenly the castle becomes real, and the iron gate grinds shut.
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But you like him already, I can tell. Even though we showed our teeth and were very clear about his being wicked.
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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 think I look a little like a pumpkin,” whispered September, secretly delighted. “I’m all green and orange.
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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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Of late, she had felt coldness in herself, and though she feared it, she loved it too, for it made her strong.
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Chicago at the time owned a lake the size of a sea, several advertising firms, at least six tribes of marauding criminals, healthy herds of sailors grazing free, the first Ferris wheel in all the world, and more wind than it could care for.
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It’s a funny thing. You go your whole life thinking you’re the protagonist, but really, you’re just backstory.