Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
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Where’s the nerdy shy Predator scientist who figured out how to build a spaceship while all the big jock Predators were down the pub ripping one another’s spines out, eh?
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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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Where there is a Key, there is yet hope.
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Bad luck relies on absolutely perfect timing.
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They climbed their ladders to wheedle and prune the trees into holiness
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We are all dead. All equal. Broken and aimless and believing we are alive. This is Russia and it is 1952. What else would you call hell?
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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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I do not serve your personal issues, Morevna. I serve the People, and the People will have crimes against their body answered. You fought at Leningrad. So did I. Why should he be spared?' 'Somebody ought to be.
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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.
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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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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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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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If enough lost things band together, even in the darkest depths, they aren’t really lost at all anymore.
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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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Some switches must be flipped, and some children cannot help turning off to on and on to off, just to see what will happen.
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When the aliens come, there’ll be one queue to fight them and one queue to fuck them, and the second one’ll be longer by light-years.
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How poor you are, September. You make my heart groan. I know about Homesickness. It begins with H. What will you do?
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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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"I think I look a little like a pumpkin,” whispered September, secretly delighted. “I’m all green and orange.
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“Don’t worry,” Marya whispered, kissing his forehead. “My old bones will follow yours soon enough.
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Brine shrimp were not overly talkative, squirrels failed to make significant headway in the fields of technology and mathematics, and seagulls were clearly unburdened by reason, feeling, or remorse.
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This is what a grown-up looks like, thought September. Not like the grown-ups in my world who look sad and disappointed and grimy with work and bored with everything.
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She still longed for the best heights of magic, to see dragons and mermaids, to see the naked world.