Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
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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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A tale may have exactly three beginnings: one for the audience, one for the artist, and one for the poor bastard who has to live in it.
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No one cared who they'd been before, or even who they were now. Sometimes it felt like they lived at the bottom of the world. People at the bottom of the world mind their business, mostly.
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Mary's smile is a spotlight - whomever it lands upon becomes brighter, becomes more real. It lands upon us.
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God is a random event, a nexus of pain and pleasure and making and breaking.
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Autumn has a hungry heart - September is the beginning of death.
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Surely you didn't think deathless meant dickless.
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A ring don’t make a bride, that’s all.
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A dragon looks like a girl when it is young.
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Horses, in secret, love hats more than any other creature. It is a horse’s tragedy that they can never properly wear one.
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People who share a secret share a heart.
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We are a Body of contradiction, flesh-full and fleshless.
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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 is a terrible magic in this world to ask for exactly the thing you want. Not least because to know exactly the thing you want and look it in the eye is a long, long labor.
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All children are required to attend School, which is like a party to which everyone forgot to bring punch, or hats, or fiddles, and none of the games have good prizes.
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Everything in the world, it turns out, is escapable except economy.
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“I can never remember my dreams," said the shadow of the Marquess quietly. "You must have had rich, tasty ones then. When you can't remember a dream, it's because a Baku ate it.
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"The Heart of Fairyland is a story," she said, and she felt so warm and light and full of rightness of it that she thought she might faint.
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"I do believe everyone in Fairyland-Below is royalty!" September exclaimed. "Queens and Princes and Vicereines and Emperors - it's like visiting Europe!
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Readers will always insist on adventures, and though you can have grief without adventures, you cannot have adventures without grief.
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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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Wouldn't you like to have comrades?' But she would not like that. She wanted only to rest and to read her old, rain-swollen books, turning the pages carefully, so carefully.
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These words were small and they only meant what they said, not how they felt before he said them. He nearly wept with the frustration of it.
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It is well known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else.