Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
-
If you have ever seen a falling star, you have seen a Changeling arriving.
-
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.
-
What was magical at two in the morning was tawdry and cheap and dangerous to your health at two in the afternoon.
-
Check your pockets, my chimney-child.
-
...the beginning is where the end gets born.
-
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.
-
A Bank is but a college of Fiscal Magic.
-
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.
-
No one belongs when they are new to this world. All children are Changelings.
-
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.
-
We were just holes, after all, holes filled up with light, and deep in our secret hearts we worried that we were an accident
-
That a clever person is never bored, and a bored person is never clever.
-
Just remember that the only question in a house is who is to rule. The rest is only dancing around that, trying not to look it in the eye.
-
The war is always going badly.
-
We like the wrong sorts of girls, they wrote. They are usually the ones worth writing about.
-
...her cry is a hook and it catches me in the throat.
-
Hounds and hearthstones, girl, haven't you ever heard a story about Koschei? He's only got the one. Act one, Scene one: pretty girl. Act one, Scene two: pretty girl gone!
-
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.
-
I perceive that you have a cruel heart, my child. It lies within your breast like a smoldering blade, hissing steam at me.
-
Life is beautiful and life is stupid. This is, in fact, widely regarded as a universal rule not less inviolable than the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Uncertainty Principle, and No Post on Sundays.
-
I have survived, but I have not been spared.
-
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.
-
There must be a way! I have begun a Quest! Quests do not simply end. You win or you lose; it is not just suddenly over.
-
When you don’t need anything anymore, the only thing you need is stories, and songs, and beauty, and spectacle. That’s the good stuff. The stuff that reminds us who we are.