Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
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That’s what happens to friends, eventually. They leave you. It’s practically what they’re for.
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You took on a Quest, which is a thing only men - and exceedingly stupid men, usually - do.
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Everything in the world is a boxing match in your heart, between Boldness and Not-Boldness. You let them holler inside you and wallop each other with Arguments For and Against. Then you end by betting on one or the other and that’s how things get decided.
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A body can only deliver up the truth its bones know, Its blood, which is its history.
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“Brother," he wept, "my heart is being cut in two. I cannot bear it." "Tscha!" said the Tsar of Birds. "Life is like that.”
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It is such hard work to keep your heart hidden! And worse, by the time you find it easy, it will be harder still to show it.
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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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After love, no one is what they were before.
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But I’ve brought you to the snow, and the snow is the beginning and the end of everything, everyone knows that.
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The Land of Parents is strange and full of peril.
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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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You will always fall in love, and it will always be like having your throat cut, just that fast.
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All the rest of the nonsense a story requires is just a long seduction of the ending.
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No one is a cup for another to drink from
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A book is a door into another place and another heart and another world.
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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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She'd thought she left feeling helpless behind long ago - only we never leave helpless behind. It is a country in which we all hold passports.
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Things which are gone in the morning: sleep, darkness, grief, the moon. Women. Dreams.
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He does everything a Marshal does but twice as hard, twice as dirty, and without the soft and cushioning arms of the government to wipe his tears.
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Everyone Is Looking for a Book Strong Enough to Change Them.
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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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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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Storytelling can save you. Both the telling and the listening.
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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.