Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
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You're just shy of figuring out how to shuffle your horde of hormone-curdled control-obsessed malignant narcissists off world. In short, you were about to become our problem. But now there is no problem! Now there is a process.
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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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All coral in every world think of Australia the way that you and I think of Mesopotamia - it is the ancestral paradise of their civilization and they send it Valentines each February.
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There is no such thing as a good wife or a good husband. Only ones who bide their time.
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She drank like a Czar and sang like a broken squeezebox and danced like the Sugarplum Fairy cutting loose at last
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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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We hold demonstrations and civil wars when inequities are discovered.
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And hell, sometimes the best thing is to put on a black dress and become a wicked stepmother. There’s power in that, if you’re after power.
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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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I said: I could be a wolf for you. I could put my teeth on your throat. I could growl. I could eat you whole. I could wait for you in the dark. I could howl against your hair.
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Memory is like that. It alters itself so that girls are always trapped under the earth, waiting in the dark.
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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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And as we watched, the Tsar of Death lifted up his eyelids like skirts and began to dance in the streets of Leningrad.
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I wish you the best that can be hoped for, and no worse than can be expected.
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September drank in the starry sky with a longing and a tugging and a sigh. All the way up, to that enormous crescent in the black.
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They were all whispers now, the two of them, conspirators and thieves.
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It is in the nature of winds to Snatch and Grasp at things, and Blow Them Away.
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As all mothers know, children travel faster than kisses. The speed of kisses is, in fact, what Doctor Fallow would call a cosmic constant. The speed of children has no limits.
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I sell Damascus steel, folded and intricate, dug up from the earth, practically useless, desirable only to lovers of the arcane, the beautiful, the old. No
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Fairyland is a very Scientifick place. We subscribe to all the best journals.
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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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…but she does not know whom she wishes to catch, only that she wishes to catch someone, anyone, to be anchored, to be connected, to not be abandoned.
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So most people go around with grimy machinery, when all it would take is a bit of spit and polish to make them paladins once more, bold knights and true.
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I’ll put this in words you can understand: humans are hideous, pain-guzzling, pollution-spouting space monsters who might threaten our way of life.