Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
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We hold demonstrations and civil wars when inequities are discovered.
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...For grace may only be found briefly, and always in the midst of madness.
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He had not guessed how much of the body of a Quest was simply walking.
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There is no such thing as a good wife or a good husband. Only ones who bide their time.
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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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Maidens stand still, they are lovely statues and all admire them. Witches do not stand still. I was neither, but better that I err on the side of witchery, witchery that unlocks towers and empties ships.
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How long your hair has grown. You could strangle a man in it.
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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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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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The future is a messy, motley business, little girl.
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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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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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I am the plague which will burn through the marrow of the Anointed City.
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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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Sell your soul and half your shoes for a glass of gin.
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…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.
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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.
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Her heart ached as though a knife had quietly slipped between her ribs.
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Nobody came without their sequins roaring.
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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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Marya pinned out her childhood like a butterfly. She considered it the way a mathematician considers an equation.
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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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I heard there’s fire in hell, but I’ll bet the devil just hands you a bucket and tells you to get moving, this place ain’t gonna clean itself.
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She was determined that I hold this thing inside me like a heart - something irremovable and constant.