Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
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You are not the chosen one, September. Fairyland did not choose you – you chose yourself.
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The storm ate up September’s cry of despair, delighted at its mischief, as all storms are.
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“I will keep it safe for you," Saturday whispered, barely brave enough to say it.
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"You look like a winter night", he had told her when he had given it to her. "I could sleep inside the cold of you".
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But luck can be spent, like money; and lost, like a memory; and wasted, like a life.
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We were just holes, after all, holes filled up with light, and deep in our secret hearts we worried that we were an accident
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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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I readied myself for the great effort of speaking with the throat-and-belly instead of the mind-and-heart. It is altogether a different skill.
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Oh, aren't you just the rottenest wet blanket whoever spoiled a sport.
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A dragon looks like a girl when it is young.
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All things built with tax money are beautiful: so we must think or go mad.
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Most folk have three faces - the face they get when they're children, the face they own when they're grown, and the face they've earned when they're old.
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When the world loses its fucking mind and turns on you like a stupid feral cat you thought was tame, it happens. Everyone does the long, woozy whistle, and keel over.
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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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Remember this when you are queen,” he whispered hoarsely. “I moved the earth and the water for you.
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Things that cannot long be kept secret: death in the family, the loss of a ring, corruption of the spirit, boredom, illicit love. Sickness. Addiction. Pregnancy.
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Can you imagine what it would do to a person, to know that they were standing between three people and that marrow-deep, desperate need?
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A book is a door into another place and another heart and another world.
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But soon the wine sack was empty, and sleep brushed my ears with her ash-lips.
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A heart can learn ever so many tricks, and what sort of beast it becomes depends greatly upon whether it has been taught to sit up or to lie down, to speak or to beg, to roll over or to sound alarms, to guard or to attack, to find or to stay
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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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That's your first hint that something's alive. It says no.
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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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Children make prayers so thoughtlessly, building them up like sand castles - and they are always surprised when suddenly the castle becomes real, and the iron gate grinds shut.