Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
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Your past’s a private matter, sweetheart. You just keep it locked up in a box where it can’t hurt anyone.
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I thought: this is how you make a human being. A human being is beautiful and sick. A human being glitters and starves.
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Some switches must be flipped, and some children cannot help turning off to on and on to off, just to see what will happen.
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She knew herself, how she had slowly, over years, become a cat, a wolf, a snake, anything but a girl. How she had wrung out her girlhood like death.
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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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Remember this when you are queen,” he whispered hoarsely. “I moved the earth and the water for you.
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Rich girls aren’t criminals, don’t you know? They’re just troubled, poor things.
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The nearness of him crushed her, like being held by the sun.
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It is important to announce your intentions at top volume, she thought, or your intentions will think you are ashamed of them.
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Love is what grown folk do to each other because the law frowns on killing.
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Who knows what wild things Sleeping Beauty dreamt of while waiting to awake?
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But we had young turnips and mustard greens in our befuddled stomach that day, and these things make bravery.
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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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A ring don’t make a bride, that’s all.
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If you want to kill yourself, do not use us as your knife.
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He’ll never be good if he can’t choose to be nasty. It’s the choice that makes the good.
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It is true that novelists are shameless and obey no decent law, and they are not to be trusted on any account, but some Mysteries even they must honor.
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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.
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People are mostly happiest when they think they're just about to get the thing they want most. Before and after, they're all monsters.
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And the heart of Ivan Nikolayevich broke inside the body of Marya Morevna, and the pieces of him lodged deep in her bones, and through the window, the stars watched.
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Perhaps, if you take a long enough view, we are all stronger than our goblins.
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A house is a kind of box you put a girl in.
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The dead know how to savor as the living never can.
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Men die. It's practically what they're for.