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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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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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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If enough lost things band together, even in the darkest depths, they aren’t really lost at all anymore.
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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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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 am sustained by Being Necessary.
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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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...For grace may only be found briefly, and always in the midst of madness.
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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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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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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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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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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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You’re not in love if you keep your own heart bricked up behind your bones. You’re only playing.
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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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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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The grass and the rivers and the stones and women and horses and more Stars and men and clouds and birds and trees came dancing through the afterbirth of the Mare
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What was a person, if not the things they knew and the face they wore?
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Fairyland is a very Scientifick place. We subscribe to all the best journals.
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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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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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But you like him already, I can tell. Even though we showed our teeth and were very clear about his being wicked.