Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
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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.
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It's a secret and if you tell a secret the secret comes alive and can never be kept safe at home again.
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The bears, over the years, have developed a primitive but heartfelt Buddhist discipline. Beneath the cinnamon trees they practice the repetition of the Growling Sutra.
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I've always had enough, even if my enough and your enough are as different as an elephant and a minaret.
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This is how you learn to see: You put together a crew. No one can see a damn thing clearly with only two eyes.
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And indeed, as night drew on the sky like a bodice, lacing it with the last beams of sunlight
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Truly, Mallow yearned to know everything. Curiosity was part of her, like her short blond hair and bitten fingernails.
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Ivan said, If only we could eat violin music.
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The storm ate up September’s cry of despair, delighted at its mischief, as all storms are.
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You are not the chosen one, September. Fairyland did not choose you – you chose yourself.
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I abandoned her. It's the one capital crime of fatherhood. Mothers can fail a thousand different ways. A father's only job is: do not abandon this child.
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There are no tigers for us, just a city, waiting, and it loves us, in whatever ways a city can love.
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No one is now what they were before the war. There’s just no getting any of it back.
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But lost children always find each other, in the dark, in the cold. It is as though they are magnetized, and can only attract their like.
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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.
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You can’t kiss a girl into anything.
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Monsters, you know, cannot appreciate the niceties of commandments carved in stone.
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The body does the living; the shadow does the dreaming.
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That’s what a map is, you know. Just a memory.
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Things that begin and end in grief: marriage, harvest, childbirth. Journeys away from home. Journeys toward home. Surgeries. Love. Weeping.
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In the beginning there was Dust, and in the end there will be Dust, and in the middle there is Dust, Dust, Dust!
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Most folk have three faces - the face they get when they're children, the face they own when they're grown, and the face they've earned when they're old.
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Honesty is such a nasty habit, dear. Like biting your nails.
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A body is never so vicious as when it has only itself to blame for its trouble.