Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
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Rich girls aren’t criminals, don’t you know? They’re just troubled, poor things.
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They want only their private toys and candies, and will not share.
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That's your first hint that something's alive. It says no.
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Sometimes I worry. Worrying is defined as obsessive examination of one’s own code.
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It was on the to-do list, but you know to-do lists. They get longer and longer until you might as well just carve the last items on your tombstone. Do the dishes.
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Everyone has their invisible cloak of all things past.
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Patience is always the last ingredient in any spell, the last part in any machine, what ever your original blue prints say.
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...her cry is a hook and it catches me in the throat.
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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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The worst thing in the world is having to go back to the dark you shook off.
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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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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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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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Why should I care about you first kiss,' he said. 'You can kiss anyone you like. But sometimes if you wanted to kiss me, that would be all right, too.
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But the longer I’m dead, the more I think the universe is a big blackboard with rules scrawled all over it in chalk and stardust and it’s just that the damn thing is flipped over and turned away from us so we can’t see anything but the erase, which death, hitting the floor.
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Eternity takes forever. The infinite expanse of time just does not know when to quit.
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In the space of one heartbeat to another I loved you and I was lost to you
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If the world is divided into seeing and not seeing, Marya thought, I shall always choose to see.
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Everything in creation is just a trick of the light - the only difference between heaven and hell is who's running those lights, who's got the switch, who knows the cues.
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The war is always going badly.
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Accuracy is next to godliness.
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But I am a sly and wicked narrator. If there is a secret to be plumbed for your benefit, Dear Reader, I shall strap on a head-lamp and a pick-ax and have at it.
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When you don’t need anything anymore, the only thing you need is stories, and songs, and beauty, and spectacle. That’s the good stuff. The stuff that reminds us who we are.