Catherynne M. Valente Quotes

All jobs are odd, or they would be games or naps or picnics.

When the world changes, it stashes us away where we can't make it run the other way again.

there is only this world, as it is now, and there has never been another, can never be any other.

This is what comes of having a heart, even a very small and young one. It causes no end of trouble, and that’s the truth.

Do not ruin today with mourning tomorrow.

Stories have a way of changing faces. They are unruly things, undisciplined, given to delinquency and the throwing of erasers. This is why we must close them up into thick, solid books, so they cannot get out and cause trouble.

I'm not lost, because I haven't any idea where to go that I might get lost on the way to. I'd like to get lost, because then I'd know where I was going, you see.

Hats have power. Hats can change you into someone else.

You should always listen to minotaurs. Anybody with four stomachs has to have a firm grip on reality.

Just remember that the only question in a house is who is to rule. The rest is only dancing around that, trying not to look it in the eye.

I will not let her speak because I love her, and when you love someone, you do not make them tell war stories. A war story is a black space. On the one side is before and on the other side is after, and what is inside belongs only to the dead.

Men die. It's practically what they're for.

Death is not a checkmate…it is more like a carnival trick. You cannot win, no matter how you move your Queen.

And as we watched, the Tsar of Death lifted up his eyelids like skirts and began to dance in the streets of Leningrad.

I wonder sometimes what the memory of God looks like. Is it a palace of infinite rooms, a chest of many jeweled objects, a long, lonely landscape where each tree recalls an eon, each pebble the life of a man? Where do I live, in the memory of God?

Where there is a Key, there is yet hope.

All things are strange which are worth knowing.

Hearts set about finding other hearts the moment they are born, and between them, they weave nets so frightfully strong and tight that you end up bound forever in hopeless knots, even to the shadow of a beast you knew and loved long ago.

To touch a person...to sleep with a person...is to become a pioneer," she whispered then, "a frontiersman at the edge of their private world, the strange, incomprehensible world of their interior, filled with customs you could never imitate, a language which sounds like your own but is really totally foreign, knowable only to them.

It is harder, usually, to find a person who wants to walk the streets of me, to taste the teas of my country, to... immigrate, you could say.

... relationships required such vigilance, such attention. You had to hold them together by force of will, and other people took up so much space, demanded so much time. It was exhausting.

I have all the books I could need, and what more could I need than books?

Tamburlaine's house seemed more a place where books kept their people than where people kept their books.

We like the wrong sorts of girls, they wrote. They are usually the ones worth writing about.

It is well known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else.

What happens to anything beautiful? Viy ate it up.

I expect everyone in Boston has something like that ring, which is why I am glad I have never been to Boston.

Monsters almost always are culture's way of working out their fears.

Everyone is a criminal! We are beset on all sides by antirevolutionary forces. Naturally, then, humans fall into three categories: the criminal, the not-yet-criminal, and the not-yet-caught.

In both marriage and war you must cut up the things people say like a cake and eat only what you can stomach.

Her father’s shadow looked sadly down at her. “You can never forget what you do in a war, September my love. No one can. You won’t forget your war either.

War is not for winning, Masha," sighed Koschei, reading the tracks of supply lines, of pincer strategies, over her shoulder. "It is for surviving.

The ghosts will eat everything because the bellies of ghosts want the whole world, just to fill one tiny corner.

The war is always going badly.

Your past's a private matter, sweetheart. You just keep it locked up in xbox where it can't hurt anyone.

Death stands behind every bride, every groom.

I ate all of my husbands. First I ate their love, then their will, then their despair, and then I made pies of their bodies - and those bodies were so dear to me!

I thought: this is how you make a human being. A human being is beautiful and sick. A human being glitters and starves.

But I shall choose to remember you, and it would be nice if it went both ways. That’s how it generally goes in my country.” But does it? September thought. If a body is hurt, they try to forget the person who hurt them and never think about the pain again.

Family is a transitive property.

Music has more rules than math or magic and it's twice as dangerous as both or either.

That’s what happens to friends, eventually. They leave you. It’s practically what they’re for.

We are halves, but we make an infinite whole.

Children make prayers so thoughtlessly, building them up like sand castles - and they are always surprised when suddenly the castle becomes real, and the iron gate grinds shut.

Children are natural practitioners of the Queer and the Questing, for childhood is nothing but a quest through a queer country. Of course, they often have a good deal of trouble with the Quiet.

I have to know, I have to or else you will just rule me until the end of everything because you know and I do not.

And hell, sometimes the best thing is to put on a black dress and become a wicked stepmother. There’s power in that, if you’re after power.

Let me tell you something, kid," said Mrs. H of Boston and Beacon Hill. "Magic is just a word for what's left to the powerless once everyone else has eaten their fill.

All money is imaginary," answered the Calcatrix simply. "Money is magic everyone agrees to pretend is not magic.

A Bank is but a college of Fiscal Magic.

So most people go around with grimy machinery, when all it would take is a bit of spit and polish to make them paladins once more, bold knights and true.

you have to have the right sort of stone. Peridot for mothers, girasol for lovers, sapphire for sadness, and garnet for joy.

We all live inside the terrible engine of authority, and it grinds and shrieks and burns so that no one will say: lines on maps are silly.

The worst thing in the world is having to go back to the dark you shook off.

A Fairy must make her own way in the world, for the world will never make way for her. That, incidentally, is the First Theorem of Questing Physicks, which you’ll learn all about when you’re older and don’t care anymore.

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