Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
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Everything good in the world has feathers and wings and claws.
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I ate all of my husbands. First I ate their love, then their will, then their despair, and then I made pies of their bodies – and those bodies were so dear to me!
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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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Firebirds are such frustating quarry. One minute it's all fiery tail feathers and red talons and the next, nothing but ash and a sore seat.
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But in the end, all wars are more or less the same. If you dig down through the layers of caramel corn and peanuts and choking, burning death, you’ll find the prize at the bottom and the prize is a question and the question is this: Which of us are people and which of us are meat?
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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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Everything looks like magic when you don’t understand it.
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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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Temperament, you'll find, is highly dependent on time of day, weather, frequency of naps, and whether one has had enough to eat.
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She must protect herself. There would be no one to do it for her. A plan started to prick up its ears inside her, slowly, but getting stronger.
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I can't stop," the shark rasped. "If I stop, I shall sink and die. That's the way I'm made. I have to keep going always, and even when I get where I'm going, I'll have to keep on. That's living.
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Where there's a labyrinth, there's a minotaur, and vice versa! I can't imagine a decent maze that would be caught dead without a minotaur.
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Just because it's imaginary doesn't mean it isn't real.
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... but as has been said, September read often, and liked it best when words did not pretend to be simple, but put on their full armor and rode out with colors flying.
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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 outraces memory.
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She is dead. Almost certainly dead. Nearly conclusively dead. She is, at the very least, not answering her telephone.
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I have not been in Fairyland nearly long enough to start crying, September thought, then bit her tongue savagely.
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A labyrinth, when it is big enough, is just the world.
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You can't trust just any old person who comes along with a hundred puffins and a pretty face!
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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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Who knows what wild things Sleeping Beauty dreamt of while waiting to awake?
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Sometimes I worry. Worrying is defined as obsessive examination of one’s own code.
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That's how it goes - as soon as there's anything interesting in Ancient Greece, some arsehole with a magic hat comes along to murder it.