Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
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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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She'd thought she left feeling helpless behind long ago - only we never leave helpless behind. It is a country in which we all hold passports.
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Funniest thing about love, how it shakes loose when no one's looking. How the dark helps it along. Maybe that's why we dug caves so much, way back when.
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Life is like that. Death sweeps it away. That's what death is for. That's why they keep telling this story. It's the only story.
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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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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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No, love, in real life you can get all the way to death and never have finished one single story.
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A prophetic world that can never come true.
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If one did not have at least a little luck, one would never survive childhood. But luck can be spent, like money; and lost, like a memory; and wasted, like a life.
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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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Just because it's imaginary doesn't mean it isn't real.
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One doesn’t behave at all the same way to a grandfather as to a bosom friend, to a professor as to a curious niece.
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The burnt-off connectors and shadows where Ravan once filled my spaces - those, I think, are the sensations of grief.
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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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A book is a door, you know. Always and forever. A book is a door into another place and another heart and another world.
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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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Everything good in the world has feathers and wings and claws.
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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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I know real dirt looks nothing like this. Nothing like soft blood flecked with black bone.
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You are a Witch. I am a Prince. In all the books, where there is a Witch and a Prince there is a way.
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You take sides if your smart. Offer up your loyalty cause it's all you've got to trade. Trouble is, most times, when you're looking to sell your soul, nobody's buying. - Radiance
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You’re not in love if you keep your own heart bricked up behind your bones. You’re only playing.
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If she was in a teaching mood she wasn't in a hitting mood. Like sneezing and keeping your eyes open, Mrs. H couldn't do both at once.
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All jobs are odd, or they would be games or naps or picnics.