Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
-
September had only had coffee once, when her Aunt Margaret had snuck her a sip while her mother wasn’t looking. It tasted bitter, but wild and strange. She rather wanted to taste it again.
-
Everybody was terribly distracted by the seemingly unending, white-hot, existential, logistical, mostly mundane troubles of their own day-to-day lives.
-
"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!"
-
But cheating has always been the purview of fairies, and as we are about to enter their domain, we ought to act in accordance with local customs.
-
She long ago learned that if she waited and blinked and behaved like a pupil, eventually someone would lecture her on something.
-
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.
-
He had not guessed how much of the body of a Quest was simply walking.
-
After so long keeping to herself and tending her secret quietly, all these words just bubbled up out of her her like cool golden champagne.
-
And as we watched, the Tsar of Death lifted up his eyelids like skirts and began to dance in the streets of Leningrad.
-
Nobody came without their sequins roaring.
-
There is no such thing as a good wife or a good husband. Only ones who bide their time.
-
The ghosts will eat everything because the bellies of ghosts want the whole world, just to fill one tiny corner.
-
However unlikely it may seem, it is the truth and, therefore, one hundred percent likely.
-
It’s the most marvelous and terrible thing in the world. Everyone, but everyone, is pretending to be someone else.
-
…but she does not know whom she wishes to catch, only that she wishes to catch someone, anyone, to be anchored, to be connected, to not be abandoned.
-
She drank like a Czar and sang like a broken squeezebox and danced like the Sugarplum Fairy cutting loose at last
-
She was determined that I hold this thing inside me like a heart - something irremovable and constant.
-
Perhaps my philosophy is not so sophisticated. It goes: Come inside. I love you. A Whelk's love will grow as big as it's allowed.
-
War is not for winning, Masha," sighed Koschei, reading the tracks of supply lines, of pincer strategies, over her shoulder. "It is for surviving.
-
Being the oldest sometimes meant being everyone's boss, but mostly, it meant being everyone's pack mule.
-
You know how we can be about things which sparkle and shine. We imagine they will put back something of what has been lost.
-
I still want to kiss you. To feel the life in you seize on the life in me. Raw and fresh and new.
-
"I think I look a little like a pumpkin,” whispered September, secretly delighted. “I’m all green and orange.
-
You have to be able to see the world as a whole to bear it - to see the Queerness that moves in every bit of Fairyland, how it threads through every heart and field, how we are all bound together up in the Weird Well of the World.