Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
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Where there's a labyrinth, there's a minotaur, and vice versa! I can't imagine a decent maze that would be caught dead without a minotaur.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Monsters almost always are culture's way of working out their fears.
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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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A clever person is never bored, and a bored person is never clever.
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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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A labyrinth, when it is big enough, is just the world.
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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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She felt as she often did in class when she was nearly sure she had the right answer, but could not always make herself raise her hand.
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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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As all mothers know, children travel faster than kisses. The speed of kisses is, in fact, what Doctor Fallow would call a cosmic constant. The speed of children has no limits.
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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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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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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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Her heart ached as though a knife had quietly slipped between her ribs.
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We always dreamed the same dreams, which was like living twice.
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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.