Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
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The dead know how to savor as the living never can.
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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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That's just the first part. What others call you, you become. It's a terrible magic that everyone can do - so do it. Call yourself what you wish to become.
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The worst thing in the world is having to go back to the dark you shook off.
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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 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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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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First, the avid student must be aware that when the world was young it knew only seven things: water, life and death, salt, night, birds and the length of an hour.
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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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She must have cried for some secret amphibian reason. Then her dress caught on fire while they danced, and there was a mess, but that's neither here nor there.
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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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Anything is a poem if you say it often enough.
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Flowers are always more serious than they appear.
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It is better to be strong and cruel than to be fair. At least, one eats better that way. And morality is more dependent on the state of one's stomach than of one's nation
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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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Up to no good may mean up to something interesting!
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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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It's not nihilism is there's really no point to anything.
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Trouble is, most times, when you go looking to sell your soul, nobody's buying.
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The bears, over the years, have developed a primitive but heartfelt Buddhist discipline. Beneath the cinnamon trees they practice the repetition of the Growling Sutra.
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After love, no one is what they were before.
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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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When little ones say they want to go home, they almost never mean it. They mean they are tired of this particular game and would like to start another.
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But soon the wine sack was empty, and sleep brushed my ears with her ash-lips.