Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
-
A dragon looks like a girl when it is young.
-
Do you know, Masha, how revelation comes? Like death. So sudden, though you knew all along it must occur. A revelation is always the end of something. It might even be cause for grief.
-
The hinterlands. Where the criminals and the carnivals and the concatenating counterfeiters of no morals to speak of make a home.
-
But soon the wine sack was empty, and sleep brushed my ears with her ash-lips.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Flowers are always more serious than they appear.
-
"We like the wrong sort of girls", they wrote. "They are usually the ones worth writing about.
-
Anything is a poem if you say it often enough.
-
“I can never remember my dreams," said the shadow of the Marquess quietly. "You must have had rich, tasty ones then. When you can't remember a dream, it's because a Baku ate it.
-
No one’s good just from being born any place
-
Greta, Greta, he whispered, eyes shut in rapture, on thy breast I write my Edda, at thy feet I lay the keys of Niflheim, by thy leave alone, I live, and breathe, and die.
-
You can't say no if you don't have desires and opinions and wants of your own. You wouldn't even want to. No is the heart of thinking.
-
All things built with tax money are beautiful: so we must think or go mad.
-
Horses, in secret, love hats more than any other creature. It is a horse’s tragedy that they can never properly wear one.
-
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."
-
And Miss Oleander Coy had herself a blue mouth. Little stains at the edges of her raspberry lips where she put her pen when she was thinking, which was always.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I believe we have an utterly unique specimen on our hands: a child who listens.
-
So I talk to the dead. They're the only ones who can see the whole story. All they've got is story.
-
But love is love, and love is compulsion. I must, and I do.
-
Everything living has a mouth. Mouths bite and swallow; they talk; they taste. They kiss. A mouth is the main tool for living.
-
Are you the only human in the world then? And all of the rest of us monsters?