Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
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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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It was on the to-do list, but you know to-do lists. They get longer and longer until you might as well just carve the last items on your tombstone. Do the dishes.
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. . .building is medicine for free.
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Al kept it coming and nobody asked how and his only rule was: share. Be warm, be innocent, open your everything, speak easy. Share
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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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Readers will always insist on adventures, and though you can have grief without adventures, you cannot have adventures without grief.
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Check your pockets, my chimney-child.
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Anything is a poem if you say it often enough.
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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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...her cry is a hook and it catches me in the throat.
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That a clever person is never bored, and a bored person is never clever.
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The dead know how to savor as the living never can.
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No one cared who they'd been before, or even who they were now. Sometimes it felt like they lived at the bottom of the world. People at the bottom of the world mind their business, mostly.
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There's no fun in arguing if you never get shown up. Who plays a game it there's no chance they'll lose? I do so crave to be proven wrong,. It is as sweet as proving yourself right, when done properly.
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Perhaps, if you take a long enough view, we are all stronger than our goblins.
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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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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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A basic moral imperative is in play here. If you can protect a child, you must.
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She is my wife and I am her own and you were not invited. Leave us alone.
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She did not want to read this book from start to finish, or rather, she thought perhaps it did not want her to. Instead she practiced the art of bibliomancy, trusting the book to show her what it wanted her to know.
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The kind of smile that has kept a froggy, dark sort of surprise in its back pocket, and won’t spoil it too soon.
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I have all the books I could need, and what more could I need than books?
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You'll forgive the flowery talk, won't you? Our family does so love to be told they are beautiful. Vanity is an old and venerable habit.
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We all live inside the terrible engine of authority, and it grinds and shrieks and burns so that no one will say: lines on maps are silly.