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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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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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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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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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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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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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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A Fairy must make her own way in the world, for the world will never make way for her. That, incidentally, is the First Theorem of Questing Physicks
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If there are spells, they have a right to weave.
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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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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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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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Will Hilt to hand yet be restored? Take me up, thy mother's sword.
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But the Tsar of Death and the Tsar of Life greatly feared one another, for Death is surrounded by souls, and is never lonely, and the Tsar of Life had hidden his death away in a place deeper than secrets, and more secret than depth.
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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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...For grace may only be found briefly, and always in the midst of madness.
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Fairyland is a very Scientifick place. We subscribe to all the best journals.
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Death stands behind every bride, every groom.
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But it is difficult for men to disbelieve a woman who insists that she wishes to serve them, and he nodded assent.
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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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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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Pandemic, Pangaea, Panacea, Panoply. Those were all big words, to be sure, but as has been said, September read often, and liked it best when words did not pretend to be simple, but put on their full armor and rode out with colors flying.
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But cheating has always been the purview of fairies, and as we are about to enter their domain, we ought to act in accordance with local customs.
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For a witch is nothing without her Spoon.