Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
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But you like him already, I can tell. Even though we showed our teeth and were very clear about his being wicked.
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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?
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"Don't trust metaphors," the wombat snorted. "If you let things start claiming to mean other things, there's no limit on how many things they can mean!"
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So a half-breed goatsnake, a Yith, and a Ghast walk into a bar.
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Nobody came without their sequins roaring.
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Kid, nobody really gets anywhere in this life. Everybody just picks someplace to hunker down and barricade themselves in. Some of us just got better bricks than others.
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When I grew a little older, and had suitors, I demanded from them rings from the bottom of the sea, or a sword from the depths of the desert, or a golden bough and a thick golden fleece, too, before I allowed even one kiss.
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You never feel so grown up as when you are eleven, and never so young and unsure as when you are forty.
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I began my life as a character in my father's films.
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Humanity lived many years and ruled the earth, sometimes wisely, sometimes well, but mostly neither.
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So you don’t love him. Why would you look for love with a man? How could a man ever understand you?
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But old women faced certain dangers in Fairyland, such as breaking a hip while riding a wild velocipede, or having everyone do what you say just because you had wrinkles.
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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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He had not guessed how much of the body of a Quest was simply walking.
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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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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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How I adore you, Marya. How well I chose. Scold me; deny me. Tell me you want what you want and damn me forever. But don’t leave me.
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No one says a word that has not been spoken a thousand times before, a thousand thousand times, and even the first of those was a repetition of words that came before.
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The future is a messy, motley business, little girl.
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A child equals the mass of Fairyland times the speed of luck squared.
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Oh, come on, you must know ‘Leave It Black.’ I see a black door and I’m extremely satisfied with how it looks?
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And that is the last lesson of childhood: You spend all your years fighting against the injustice of big folk and their big rules until you are ready to rule yourself.
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Death is not a checkmate…it is more like a carnival trick. You cannot win, no matter how you move your Queen.
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I thought: this is how you make a human being. A human being is beautiful and sick. A human being glitters and starves.