Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
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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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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 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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Bad luck relies on absolutely perfect timing.
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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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“Don’t worry,” Marya whispered, kissing his forehead. “My old bones will follow yours soon enough.
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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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“Oh!" cried the young man. "A little deaf child! How sweet! We should adopt her and teach her to write symphonies. She'll be all the rage in town. I'll buy her a powdered wig and a tricorne!
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"This is some hard-core, triple-X, keep-it-in-the-back-room-under-a-curtain, Alice in Wonderland action is what this is,” Decibel said with total delight.
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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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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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She still longed for the best heights of magic, to see dragons and mermaids, to see the naked world.
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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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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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And honey, everybody eats art and drinks stories. It's the best drunk there is!
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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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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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Sometimes, magic is like that. It lands on your head like a piano, a stupid, ancient, unfunny joke, and you spend the rest of your life picking sharps and flats out of your hair.
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In a city by the sea that was certainly never called anything so bourgeois as St. Petersburg, there stood a long, thin house on a long, thin street.
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Temptation likes best those who think they have a natural immunity, for it may laugh all the harder when they succumb.
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It's like Goguenar's Fourth General Unkillable Fact says: Everyone's always saying love is the element that binds the universe together, but that's a load of bollocks; It's convenience.
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Being the oldest sometimes meant being everyone's boss, but mostly, it meant being everyone's pack mule.
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They climbed their ladders to wheedle and prune the trees into holiness