Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
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You’re better off - theatrical folk are nothing but a bundle of monologues and anxiety headaches.
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We are all dead. All equal. Broken and aimless and believing we are alive. This is Russia and it is 1952. What else would you call hell?
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We hold demonstrations and civil wars when inequities are discovered.
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Everything is always happening all at once, in the present tense, forever, the beginning and the end and the denouement and the remaindering.
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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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Firebirds are such frustating quarry. One minute it's all fiery tail feathers and red talons and the next, nothing but ash and a sore seat.
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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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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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For a witch is nothing without her Spoon.
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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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Decibel Jones sighed and shook his head. Today was fired. Today was well and truly sacked. Today could, in point of fact, fuck all the way off.
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A labyrinth, when it is big enough, is just the world.
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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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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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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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You can never know how your clock runs. But it does run - and always faster than you think.
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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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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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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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We always dreamed the same dreams, which was like living twice.
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We all have someone we think shines so much more than we do that we are not even a moon to their sun, but a dead little rock floating in space next to their gold and their blaze.
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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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Humanity lived many years and ruled the earth, sometimes wisely, sometimes well, but mostly neither.