Catherynne M Valente Quotes

You are a Witch. I am a Prince. In all the books, where there is a Witch and a Prince there is a way.

The Land of Parents is strange and full of peril.

You ain't no woodstove; you can't just squat in the middle of my house and stew.

I savor bitterness - it is born of experience. It is the privilege of one who has truly lived.

The day of the worst thing in the world was long and hot and bright, packed so full of summer autumn seeped out through the stitches.

For a witch is nothing without her Spoon.

I am selfish. I am cruel. My mate cannot be less than I.

A father is nowhere near as valuable as a spoon.

In my experience, folk find it nigh on impossible to call a thing what it is. It

I am the Walker and the Maze.

You're grown--crooked and backbent, but grown--and it's time to stop hanging your heart on your mother.

In the beginning there was Dust, and in the end there will be Dust, and in the middle there is Dust, Dust, Dust!

Don't worry," Marya whispered, kissing his forehead. "My old bones will follow yours soon enough.

A body can only deliver up the truth its bones know, Its blood, which is its history.

It's a secret and if you tell a secret the secret comes alive and can never be kept safe at home again.

Iago shrugged his furry shoulders. As you like. Saves me the work of picking the lock with my incisor.

Family is a transitive property.

Love me, and I will laugh for you, and if you can make me laugh, my laughter will, quite simply, ransom the whole of the world from death.

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.

I wish you the best that can be hoped for, and no worse than can be expected.

Things which are gone in the morning: sleep, darkness, grief, the moon. Women. Dreams.

She is my wife and I am her own and you were not invited. Leave us alone.

If she was in a teaching mood she wasn't in a hitting mood. Like sneezing and keeping your eyes open, Mrs. H couldn't do both at once.

Don't worry, my little lump of rock. Everybody gets a chance to choose. Or else where would irony come from?

A thing too familiar becomes invisible.

The body does the living; the shadow does the dreaming.

There is no such thing as a good wife or a good husband. Only ones who bide their time.

Death stands behind every bride, every groom.

All Librarians are Secret Masters of Severe Magic. Goes with the territory.

He tried to reconstruct the story in his mind, but it kept getting confused, bleeding into itself like watercolors.

You can tell all that about me from your measuring tape?'
'Well, I use the metric system, It's the only way to get really exact numbers.

I've a devil of a habit for being right.

Of late, she had felt coldness in herself, and though she feared it, she loved it too, for it made her strong.

All things built with tax money are beautiful: so we must think or go mad.

It is in the nature of winds to Snatch and Grasp at things, and Blow Them Away.

Some switches must be flipped, and some children cannot help turning off to on and on to off, just to see what will happen.

But her heart was so cold that she could hold ice in her mouth and it would never melt.

It's not nihilism is there's really no point to anything.

I am sustained by Being Necessary.

That is what happens when a person lives alone for so long - no one else can change their ways.

But love is love, and love is compulsion. I must, and I do.

Thing is, just because you make a body shiver don't make it yours.

Today I shall be a wicked murderous tyrant and crush something nice under my heel.

They climbed their ladders to wheedle and prune the trees into holiness

He missed you
like a fish in a bowl
misses the open sea.

But it is difficult for men to disbelieve a woman who insists that she wishes to serve them, and he nodded assent.

Narrators may go where they please.

Love is what grown folk do to each other because the law frowns on killing. I

In his own country, Death can be kind. But of an end

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

if enough lost things band together, even in the darkest depths, they aren't really lost at all anymore.

I think I look a little like a pumpkin," whispered September, secretly delighted. "I'm all green and orange.

A library is never complete. That's the joy of it. We are always seeking one more book to add to our collection.

Dreams keep the heart alive.

Everything is always happening all at once, in the present tense, forever, the beginning and the end and the denouement and the remaindering.

Things that are unsightly: birthmarks, infidelity, strangers in one's kitchen. Too much sunlight. Stitches. Missing teeth. Overlong guests.

We hold demonstrations and civil wars when inequities are discovered.

It tasted like a shade of white near blue; it tasted like the idea of pearls; it tasted like a memory nearly grasped but lost at the last moment.

I perceive that you have a cruel heart, my child. It lies within your breast like a smoldering blade, hissing steam at me.

Wife sounded like something exciting, something daring, something a bit scoundrelly, like pirate or bandit. And they were bandits, of course.

People are clocks who think they wind themselves.

Over in the refrigerated section hang lies told so long ago and so often that they turned into the truth and get taught in history books.

Readers will always insist on adventures, and though you can have grief without adventures, you cannot have adventures without grief.

Why should I care about you first kiss,' he said. 'You can kiss anyone you like. But sometimes if you wanted to kiss me, that would be all right, too.

Anyway, nobody bothers with real beginnings anymore. We stopped making up stories about the creation of the world ages ago.

No, love, in real life you can get all the way to death and never have finished one single story.

We are a Body of contradiction, flesh-full and fleshless.

She was ... unhappy. It was part of her, you could not separate her from it. She was sad the way a horse is strong or a bird flies.

Bad luck relies on absolutely perfect timing.

You're not in love if you keep your own heart bricked up behind your bones. You're only playing.

But I've brought you to the snow, and the snow is the beginning and the end of everything, everyone knows that. I

A map shows maybes.

It's a law, a law of the universe. Like gravity or stupidity or how a minor chord always sounds sad.

They were all very young, really, too young for all they had seen, but too old not to have seen it.

Life is like that. Death sweeps it away. That's what death is for. That's why they keep telling this story. It's the only story.

It is best in the end to let women see to their own vengeance.

I know real dirt looks nothing like this. Nothing like soft blood flecked with black bone.

Snow White gets a Social Security card. She gets a job building houses out in California. Picks oranges.

The burnt-off connectors and shadows where Ravan once filled my spaces - those, I think, are the sensations of grief.

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

You will live as you live in any world ... With difficulty, and grief.

This is my heart - carry it with you. I will dream of you in the dark, and you will taste it in my tea, and feel it in my shoes.

Didn't you know? All stepmothers are witches. It is our compensation for remaining forever an intruder in another woman's house.

He ran like if he kept running he could escape the last thousand years.

The Sirens flicked their wings at the wall, inscribing it with their own blue ink: Even in penance is beauty; blessed are all the ocean's drowned!

What happens to anything beautiful? Viy ate it up.

That's your first hint that something's alive. It says no.

Everything good in the world has feathers and wings and claws.

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

Time is no one's friend
time has no social niceties and holds the door for nobody nowhere. But I hold the door for time, with my one good paw.

Fierce was her needle, and she wore it like a sword.

The Heart of Fairyland is a story

What is a map, but a thing that gets you where you're going?
-Mr. Map

You look like a winter night", he had told her when he had given it to her. "I could sleep inside the cold of you".

However unlikely it may seem, it is the truth and, therefore, one hundred percent likely.

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.

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.

You humans, you know, whoever built you sewed irony into your sinews.

Being stern was like being underwater-she could do it, but never for long, and how her whole boy burned to come up for breath!

Fantasy is my heart and love. And I just want to play in that garden for the rest of my life.