Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
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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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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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Everybody was terribly distracted by the seemingly unending, white-hot, existential, logistical, mostly mundane troubles of their own day-to-day lives.
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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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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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We always dreamed the same dreams, which was like living twice.
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Humanity lived many years and ruled the earth, sometimes wisely, sometimes well, but mostly neither.
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Just you wait. Papa Koschei is coming, coming, coming, over the hills on his red horse and he's got bells on his boots and a ring in his poket and he knows your name, Marya Morevna.
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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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Monsters almost always are culture's way of working out their fears.
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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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Life outraces memory.
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Life is like that. Death sweeps it away. That's what death is for. That's why they keep telling this story. It's the only story.
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Her heart ached as though a knife had quietly slipped between her ribs.
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Every cat knows how to keep his owner feeding them: You may scratch and bite ninety-nine times, but the hundredth time, you must leap into a lap and press your nose to their nose. Rules are for dogs.
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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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I wish you the best that can be hoped for, and no worse than can be expected.
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Old things have strange hungers.
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How poor you are, September. You make my heart groan. I know about Homesickness. It begins with H. What will you do?
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His parties have room for all. Come on in. Nobody to look at you funny in here. Nobody to tell you not to have that drink, kiss that fella, smash that chair, light that chandelier on fire. Do it all. Do it all forever.
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Mary's smile is a spotlight - whomever it lands upon becomes brighter, becomes more real. It lands upon us.
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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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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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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.