Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
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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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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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She still longed for the best heights of magic, to see dragons and mermaids, to see the naked world.
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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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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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When one is traveling, everything looks brighter and lovelier. That does not mean it is brighter and lovelier; it just means that sweet, kindly home suffers in comparison to tarted-up foreign places with all their jewels on.
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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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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 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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What was a person, if not the things they knew and the face they wore?
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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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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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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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How long was it, between the time when you were happy, and the time when you wanted to kill him?
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He does everything a Marshal does but twice as hard, twice as dirty, and without the soft and cushioning arms of the government to wipe his tears.
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You can't blame a book for its story.
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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 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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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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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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I burn, I freeze; I am never warm. I am rigid; I forgot softness because it did not serve me.
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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.
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Some small ones learn to stitch together a Coat of Scowls or a Scarf of Jokes to hide their Hearts. Some hammer up a Fort of Books to protect theirs.
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We hold demonstrations and civil wars when inequities are discovered.