Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
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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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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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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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It is good that you ruined your face, because it brought you to me, but also because beautiful women rarely work strong magic.
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Morality is more dependent on the state of one's stomach than of one's nation.
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Over in the refrigerated section hang lies told so long ago and so often that they turned into the truth and get taught in history books.
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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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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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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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Bad luck relies on absolutely perfect timing.
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I am sustained by Being Necessary.
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But even the wisest of men may die, and that is especially true when the wisest of men has a fondness for industrial chemicals.
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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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If enough lost things band together, even in the darkest depths, they aren’t really lost at all anymore.
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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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“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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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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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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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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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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If he lost everything else, pride, priapism, and producer credit, Decibel Jones would never, never give up his swagger.
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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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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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Life outraces memory.