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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Storytelling can save you. Both the telling and the listening.
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I am not a little girl anymore, dazzled by your magic. It is my magic, now, too.
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A book is a door into another place and another heart and another world.
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September shut her eyes several times and opened them again, just to be sure, just to be certain she was back in Fairyland, that she wasn’t simply knocked silly by her fall.
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“I will keep it safe for you," Saturday whispered, barely brave enough to say it.
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Surely you didn't think deathless meant dickless.
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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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One is always homesick for places where one came to grief.
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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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Flowers are always more serious than they appear.
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But soon the wine sack was empty, and sleep brushed my ears with her ash-lips.
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He'll burn you down like wax if you let him. You'll think it's love, while he dines on your heart. And maybe it will be. But he's so hungry, he'll eat you all in one sitting, and you'll be in his belly, and what will you do then?
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Coffee is a kind of magic you can drink.
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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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Everything in the universe has rhythm. Everything pulses to a beat laid down by the Big Bang. Everything feels the drumline of creation from star to sex to song.
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I will not let her speak because I love her, and when you love someone you do not make them tell war stories.
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People are clocks who think they wind themselves.
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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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Readers will always insist on adventures, and though you can have grief without adventures, you cannot have adventures without grief.
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Trouble is, most times, when you go looking to sell your soul, nobody's buying.
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All things built with tax money are beautiful: so we must think or go mad.
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The Land of Parents is strange and full of peril.
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I thought that for a long while, but you chose me, and then you chose him, and choosing is hard - one choice is never the end of the story.