Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
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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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God is a random event, a nexus of pain and pleasure and making and breaking.
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The Land of Parents is strange and full of peril.
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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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Perhaps, if you take a long enough view, we are all stronger than our goblins.
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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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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.
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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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But soon the wine sack was empty, and sleep brushed my ears with her ash-lips.
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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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...her cry is a hook and it catches me in the throat.
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This is my heart - carry it with you. I will dream of you in the dark, and you will taste it in my tea, and feel it in my shoes.
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Are you the only human in the world then? And all of the rest of us monsters?
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I’m quite civilized, I promise,’ Manythanks sniffed, smiling. ‘Wairwulves are cultured. We have choirs and charity races and rotary clubs. It’s when we’re human that you must take care.
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Eternity takes forever. The infinite expanse of time just does not know when to quit.
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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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No one belongs when they are new to this world. All children are Changelings.
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Your privilege is comprised of the questions you’ve never had to ask.
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...the beginning is where the end gets born.
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When you can change something just by saying a word, that is magic.
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A Bank is but a college of Fiscal Magic.
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We were just holes, after all, holes filled up with light, and deep in our secret hearts we worried that we were an accident
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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.