Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
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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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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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Memory is like that. It alters itself so that girls are always trapped under the earth, waiting in the dark.
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There is no end and no beginning. There is only we two, alone in the dark, for always.
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Humanity lived many years and ruled the earth, sometimes wisely, sometimes well, but mostly neither.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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I wish you the best that can be hoped for, and no worse than can be expected.
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We always dreamed the same dreams, which was like living twice.
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Old things have strange hungers.
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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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Life outraces memory.
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Monsters almost always are culture's way of working out their fears.
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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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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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This is what a grown-up looks like, thought September. Not like the grown-ups in my world who look sad and disappointed and grimy with work and bored with everything.
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The best way to be the kind of girl you want to be is to do what that girl would do.
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Her heart ached as though a knife had quietly slipped between her ribs.
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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.