Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
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A dragon looks like a girl when it is young.
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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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People are mostly happiest when they think they're just about to get the thing they want most. Before and after, they're all monsters.
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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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Everything in the world, it turns out, is escapable except economy.
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Anything is a poem if you say it often enough.
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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 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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You couldn't ever really fix a sad story. You could only make another. And another. And another, until you found the right one at last, the one that ends in joy.
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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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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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Up to no good may mean up to something interesting!
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But the longer I’m dead, the more I think the universe is a big blackboard with rules scrawled all over it in chalk and stardust and it’s just that the damn thing is flipped over and turned away from us so we can’t see anything but the erase, which death, hitting the floor.
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Still life is boring. Never stand still! Jumping bean life!
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What matters is entertainment. Eternity takes forever. The infinite expanse of time just does not know when to quit. The dead fear boredom the way mortals fear death.
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Any story told is a lie cunningly told to hide the real world from the poor bastards who live in it.
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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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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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No one’s good just from being born any place
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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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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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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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Because the opposite of fascism isn't anarchy, it's theater.
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. . .building is medicine for free.