Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
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Everyone is a criminal! We are beset on all sides by antirevolutionary forces. Naturally, then, humans fall into three categories: the criminal, the not-yet-criminal, and the not-yet-caught.
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Close up your head; your brain is getting loose.
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It's Survival of Them Who's Best at Nicking Things, girl!
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We’ve made too many movies, you and I. Or too few. Always too few. Too many to have any meaning, too few to say what we meant.
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Did everything that had magic have teeth?
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[...] everything has a narrative, really, and if you can’t understand a story and relate to it, figure out how you fit inside it, you’re not really alive at all.
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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.
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...snow is the beginning and the end of everything...
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We like the wrong sorts of girls, they wrote. They are usually the ones worth writing about.
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We who were once living can guard you still, and love you, and keep you living safe and whole. Nothing ever truly dies.
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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!
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Can you imagine what it would do to a person, to know that they were standing between three people and that marrow-deep, desperate need?
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It is best in the end to let women see to their own vengeance.
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A tongue is very like a gun, which is why they nearly rhyme. Both can be fired to devastating effect, for good or evil, and both can explode in your hands, wounding your comrades instead of your enemies.
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Cocky don't say anything and that's as good as love right about now.
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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.
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Opium ain’t got nothing on the promise of tomorrow turning up better than today. Snow
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First, the avid student must be aware that when the world was young it knew only seven things: water, life and death, salt, night, birds and the length of an hour.
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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.
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So I talk to the dead. They're the only ones who can see the whole story. All they've got is story.
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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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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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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.
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All tamed things are made a bit ridiculous in the process, you know.