Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
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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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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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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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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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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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We think . . . that girls ought to sing. They ought to sing, and dance while they're singing. But we are not girls, and so can be almost certain that we know nothing about the matter.
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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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The storm ate up September’s cry of despair, delighted at its mischief, as all storms are.
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Surely you didn't think deathless meant dickless.
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Because the opposite of fascism isn't anarchy, it's theater.
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Coffee is a kind of magic you can drink.
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You are not the chosen one, September. Fairyland did not choose you – you chose yourself.
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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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All the rest of the nonsense a story requires is just a long seduction of the ending.
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Storytelling can save you. Both the telling and the listening.
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The Green Wind frowned into his brambly beard. “All little girls are terrible,” he admitted finally, “but the Marquess, at least, has a very fine hat."
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A dragon looks like a girl when it is young.
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"We like the wrong sort of girls", they wrote. "They are usually the ones worth writing about.
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One is always homesick for places where one came to grief.
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I believe we have an utterly unique specimen on our hands: a child who listens.
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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.
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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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Trouble is, most times, when you go looking to sell your soul, nobody's buying.