Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
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If you want to kill yourself, do not use us as your knife.
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In both marriage and war you must cut up the things people say like a cake and eat only what you can stomach.
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It takes energy for new roads to diverge in new woods, and no energy is spent with complete efficiency, without waste. Where wood has burned, there will be ash. The waste product of the constantly dividing multiverse is a fine, drifting mist of regret, and no wormhole has ever starved.
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Oh, quit that. Blushing is for virgins and Christians.
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You know how questing goes. You can’t explain it to anyone else; it would be like telling them your dreams.
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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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But I’ve brought you to the snow, and the snow is the beginning and the end of everything, everyone knows that.
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It's Latin, which is an excellent language for mischief-making, which is why governments are so fond of it.
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I have to do it myself. That's what a Queen does. She saves herself.
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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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Men die. It's practically what they're for.
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Byron kissed her gloved hand as they stepped lightly round one another. He could dance like rivers could run. No one had ever kissed her hand before. Emily felt like she was going to throw up and like she was flying all at once.
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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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I could not say what creeps and whispers through the branches and down the threaded Road, but I hear it, and I am not afraid.
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September felt sure that her shadow and everyone’s shadows were all part of the same broken thing, and broken things were to be fixed, whatever the cost, especially if you had been the one to break it in the first place.
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Rich girls aren’t criminals, don’t you know? They’re just troubled, poor things.
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Being on time is a filthy habit practised only by roosters and retirees.
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Still, she was not sorry. If the world is divided into seeing and not seeing, Marya thought, I shall always choose to see.
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I know real dirt looks nothing like this. Nothing like soft blood flecked with black bone.
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The nearness of him crushed her, like being held by the sun.
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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 started disappearing as soon as she was born. Just to get away from you.
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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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Who knows what wild things Sleeping Beauty dreamt of while waiting to awake?