Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
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When one is traveling, everything looks brighter and lovelier. That does not mean it is brighter and lovelier; it just means that sweet, kindly home suffers in comparison to tarted-up foreign places with all their jewels on.
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If enough lost things band together, even in the darkest depths, they aren’t really lost at all anymore.
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You are going to break your promise. I understand. And I hold my hands over the ears of my heart, so that I will not hate you.
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Magic does that. It wastes you away. Once it grips you by the ear, the real world gets quieter and quieter, until you can hardly hear it at all.
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All children are heartless. They have not grown a heart yet, which is why they can climb tall trees and say shocking things and leap so very high that grown-up hearts flutter in terror.
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Of course she cheated. Don't be silly. Snow White spent half her growing years shuffling cards for no one. She can cut false and she can cut true, but she wasn't going to lose when it counted.
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Do you know what a thirteen-year-old girl can do when she is alone and frightened and believes she is right?
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I am sustained by Being Necessary.
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...For grace may only be found briefly, and always in the midst of madness.
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We have all of us got it jumbled up. You never feel so grown up as when you are eleven, and never so young and unsure as when you are forty. That is why time is a rotten jokester and no one ought to let him in to dinner.
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I look at you, Masha, and it is like drinking cold water. I look at you and it is like my throat being cut.
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At the snowy summit of all these things, however, is the fact that you simply cannot go about locking your siblings in towers when they misbehave. It is unseemly and betrays a sad lack of creativity.
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I burn, I freeze; I am never warm. I am rigid; I forgot softness because it did not serve me.
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Bad luck relies on absolutely perfect timing.
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What was a person, if not the things they knew and the face they wore?
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You’re not in love if you keep your own heart bricked up behind your bones. You’re only playing.
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Fairyland is a very Scientifick place. We subscribe to all the best journals.
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You never feel so grown up as when you are eleven, and never so young and unsure as when you are forty.
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"I think I look a little like a pumpkin,” whispered September, secretly delighted. “I’m all green and orange.
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I shall be as brave as a my Toad, he thought, for my Toad never hides under the bed when she is afraid of lightning or bats. She sticks out her tongue and eats them.
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I was born a girl in a world of Branwells, but I shall be more than I am meant.
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You can't trust just any old person who comes along with a hundred puffins and a pretty face!
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How long was it, between the time when you were happy, and the time when you wanted to kill him?
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He looked so sorry and miserable as he pushed me out the door. It stung. It always stings when there's this whole story going on and you're really just a B-plot walk-on who only got a look at three pages of the script.