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.