Catherynne M. Valente Quotes
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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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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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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.
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And if they thought her aimless, if they thought her a bit mad, let them. It meant they left her alone. Marya was not aimless, anyway. She was thinking.
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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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Sweet as cherries, bright as berries, light of my moony sky.
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I wish you the best that can be hoped for, and no worse than can be expected.
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I am the plague which will burn through the marrow of the Anointed City.
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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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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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Wife sounded like something exciting, something daring, something a bit scoundrelly, like pirate or bandit. And they were bandits, of course.
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Tell it fast before you get scared and silence yourself. You’ll never wish you’d held back a little more.
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All Librarians are Secret Masters of Severe Magic. Goes with the territory.
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She was determined that I hold this thing inside me like a heart - something irremovable and constant.
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Sell your soul and half your shoes for a glass of gin.
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How long your hair has grown. You could strangle a man in it.
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It is important to announce your intentions at top volume, she thought, or your intentions will think you are ashamed of them.
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There is no end and no beginning. There is only we two, alone in the dark, for always.
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You can be innocent again. It's not true, what they say, that you can never get it back. You can. It's only that most folk cannot be bothered.
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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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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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War must always be done out of sight, or it shocks people and they stop immediately.
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You can't trust just any old person who comes along with a hundred puffins and a pretty face!
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Breaking things heals a great many hurts. This is why children do it so often.