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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.
Catherynne M. Valente -
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.
Catherynne M. Valente
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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.
Catherynne M. Valente -
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.
Catherynne M. Valente -
Everybody was terribly distracted by the seemingly unending, white-hot, existential, logistical, mostly mundane troubles of their own day-to-day lives.
Catherynne M. Valente -
Being the oldest sometimes meant being everyone's boss, but mostly, it meant being everyone's pack mule.
Catherynne M. Valente -
Be nice to Fairyland. She is old and tender of heart and when her feelings are hurt, she cries volcanoes.
Catherynne M. Valente -
Death is not a checkmate…it is more like a carnival trick. You cannot win, no matter how you move your Queen.
Catherynne M. Valente
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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.
Catherynne M. Valente -
Didn't you know? All stepmothers are witches. It is our compensation for remaining forever an intruder in another woman's house.
Catherynne M. Valente -
Wife sounded like something exciting, something daring, something a bit scoundrelly, like pirate or bandit. And they were bandits, of course.
Catherynne M. Valente -
And if they thought her aimless, if they thought her a bit mad, let them. It meant they left her alone. Marya was not aimless, anyway. She was thinking.
Catherynne M. Valente -
There is no such thing as a good wife or a good husband. Only ones who bide their time.
Catherynne M. Valente -
It is in the nature of winds to Snatch and Grasp at things, and Blow Them Away.
Catherynne M. Valente
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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.
Catherynne M. Valente -
Humanity lived many years and ruled the earth, sometimes wisely, sometimes well, but mostly neither.
Catherynne M. Valente -
You know how we can be about things which sparkle and shine. We imagine they will put back something of what has been lost.
Catherynne M. Valente -
For a witch is nothing without her Spoon.
Catherynne M. Valente -
War is not for winning, Masha," sighed Koschei, reading the tracks of supply lines, of pincer strategies, over her shoulder. "It is for surviving.
Catherynne M. Valente -
She must protect herself. There would be no one to do it for her. A plan started to prick up its ears inside her, slowly, but getting stronger.
Catherynne M. Valente
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Nobody came without their sequins roaring.
Catherynne M. Valente -
We must not dwell on what we were in our salad days when soup days steam now upon the table!
Catherynne M. Valente -
There a difference between having been coded to present a vast set of standardized responses to certain human facial, vocal, and linguistic states and having evolved to exhibit response B to input A in order to bring about a desired social result?
Catherynne M. Valente -
"This is some hard-core, triple-X, keep-it-in-the-back-room-under-a-curtain, Alice in Wonderland action is what this is,” Decibel said with total delight.
Catherynne M. Valente