Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
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September waited. She long ago learned that if she waited and blinked and behaved like a pupil, eventually someone would lecture her on something.
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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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I burn, I freeze; I am never warm. I am rigid; I forgot softness because it did not serve me.
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Death stands behind every bride, every groom.
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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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So you don’t love him. Why would you look for love with a man? How could a man ever understand you?
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Every person draws a map that shows themselves at the center. But that does not mean that no other countries exist.
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Metamorphosis is the most profound of all acts.
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How long your hair has grown. You could strangle a man in it.
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She always gave the impression of having accidentally wandered in from a mad scientist’s conference, and felt rather desperate to get back.
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But if you must be clever, then be clever. Be brave. Sleep with fists closed and shoot straight.
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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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How else are you supposed to deal with people who like terrible things? Hit them with a shovel till they stop, that’s how.
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So a half-breed goatsnake, a Yith, and a Ghast walk into a bar.
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And honey, everybody eats art and drinks stories. It's the best drunk there is!
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Marya pinned out her childhood like a butterfly. She considered it the way a mathematician considers an equation.
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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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When the aliens come, there’ll be one queue to fight them and one queue to fuck them, and the second one’ll be longer by light-years.
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We hold demonstrations and civil wars when inequities are discovered.
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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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Kid, nobody really gets anywhere in this life. Everybody just picks someplace to hunker down and barricade themselves in. Some of us just got better bricks than others.
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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 I adore you, Marya. How well I chose. Scold me; deny me. Tell me you want what you want and damn me forever. But don’t leave me.
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Sell your soul and half your shoes for a glass of gin.