Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
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Tamburlaine's house seemed more a place where books kept their people than where people kept their books.
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She smelled like accounts receivable. She looked like old money.
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A father is nowhere near as valuable as a spoon.
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No good thing can last forever, because people are terrible and we have this feeling, we all have this feeling, that if not for that essential terribleness we could have gotten further by now. Done better. Done more.
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Time is communal, Marya Morevna, the most purely communal of all commodities. It belongs to us all equally.
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And when funny things happen, you just have to go along, don't you? Because they might never happen again and you'll have missed the joke of it, missed the fun, and then when you're old and your kittens ask you what you did when the world had its glad rags on, you won't have nothing to say, will you?
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The smell of loving is a difficult one to describe, but if you think of the times when someone has held you close and made you safe, you will remember how it smells just as well as I do.
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Ragtime plinking, glasses clinking, choruses getting sung with only half the lyrics right, giggles bubbling over like a tower of champagne. It's a party, shaking down the dawn.
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It's a dreadful world with only your own heart to drive you.
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A good, solid, beefy lie is too heavy to stand on its own. It needs smaller, quicker, more complicated lies to hold it up.
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I want to skip this part. I want to pull on the arm of my slot machine and let the rolls flip over until they show a green tree in the summertime, and me away from that house, walking tall under a blue sky.
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That’s the only way to look at things, I always say,” propounded the Duke. “Slantways, sideways, and upside down.”
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She had a highly developed sense of humor which in some lights looked a bit like a sense of justice.
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I am selfish. I am cruel. My mate cannot be less than I.
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He considers it for a moment and spits out the seeds, which sprout, quickly, into tiny junk blossoms sizzling with recursive algorithms. The algorithms wriggle through thorny vines, veins of clotted pink juice.
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“First Law of Heroics.” The Monaciello grinned up at a confused September. “Someone has to tell you it’s impossible, or the Quest can’t go on."
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They were all whispers now, the two of them, conspirators and thieves.
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Children are natural practitioners of the Queer and the Questing, for childhood is nothing but a quest through a queer country. Of course, they often have a good deal of trouble with the Quiet.
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Don't you know how far women stretch?
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Because the opposite of fascism isn't anarchy, it's theater. When the world is fucked, you go to the theater, you go to the shine, and when the bad men come, all there is left to do is sing them down.
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They leave when it’s over, exeunt, pursued by a bear with an empty porridge bowl.
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It's a law, a law of the universe. Like gravity or stupidity or how a minor chord always sounds sad.
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Let us say I am something like a witch, and something like a jester, and something like a mother.
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A house, a carriage, a balloon, a ship, a racing stallionocerosupine! Is that a thing? It sounds like it ought to be, so let’s say it is!