Catherynne M. Valente Quotes

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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.

Catherynne M. Valente
This is what it means to be a woman in this world. Every step is a bargain with pain. Make your black deals in the black wood and decide what you'll trade for power. For the opposite of weakness, which is not strength but hardness. I am a trap, but so is everything. Pick your price. I am a huckster with a hand in your pocket. I am freedom and I will eat your heart.

Catherynne M. Valente
That's how you get deathless, volchitsa. Walk the same tale over and over, until you wear a groove in the world, until even if you vanished, the tale would keep turning, keep playing, like a phonograph, and you'd have to get up again, even with a bullet through your eye, to play your part and say your lines.

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

Catherynne M. Valente
You cannot escape where you come from, September. Some part of it remains inside you always, like the slender white heart in the center of the thickest onion.

Catherynne M. Valente
You and I, being grown-up and having lost our hearts at least twice or thrice along the way, might shut our eyes and cry out: Not that way, child! But as we have said, September was Somewhat Heartless, and felt herself reasonably safe on that road. Children always do.

Catherynne M. Valente
Everyone is afraid of you and when folk are afraid of a person it usually means the person is cruel in some way, and I think you are cruel, Miss Marquess, but please don't punish me for saying it. I think you know you're cruel. I think you like being cruel. I think calling you cruel is the same as calling someone else kind. And I don't want to run errands for someone cruel.

Catherynne M. Valente
When little ones say they want to go home, they almost never mean it. They mean they are tired of this particular game and would like to start another.

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

Catherynne M. Valente
Everybody's strange everywhere. Most of the trick of being a social animal is pretending you're not. But who do you fool? Nobody worth talking to.

Catherynne M. Valente
I can't imagine a decent maze that would be caught dead without a minotaur. It's not done! You don't go out of your house without any clothes on, and a minotaur doesn't go into the world without a labyrinth to keep him warm.

Catherynne M. Valente
At the bottom of philosophy something very true and very desperate whispers: Everyone is hungry all the time. Everyone is starving. Everyone wants so much, much more than they can stomach, but the appetite doesn't converse much with the stomach. Everyone is hungry and not only for food - for comfort and love and excitement and the opposite of being alone. Almost everything awful anyone does is to get those things and keep them.

Catherynne M. Valente
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.

Catherynne M. Valente
We treat our stone wives with much more care than they treat their warm ones, anyway. I personally dust mine once a week, and I know Khaamil gives them presents when I am not looking. These are yours - they are in your care, and you must be faithful.

Catherynne M. Valente
Here! 'Not thread nor glue, not nails nor screws, will ever self and shadow wed.' Helpful, those poet-types. Perhaps this one: 'Seek the grimy queen of dread machines, if you your errant shadow miss.' Now that's quite good! As a Prophetic Utterance, Third Class (Vague Hints and Mysterious Signs), you couldn't ask for better. It's downright plain-spoken!

Catherynne M. Valente
First, the avid student must be aware that when the world was young it knew only seven things: water, life and death, salt, night, birds and the length of an hour.

Catherynne M. Valente
It is such hard work to keep your heart hidden! And worse, by the time you find it easy, it will be harder still to show it. It is a terrible magic in this world to ask for exactly the thing you want. Not least because to know exactly the thing you want and look it in the eye is a long, long labor.

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

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

Catherynne M. Valente
If I stop, I shall sink and die. That's the way I'm made. I have to keep going always, and even when I get where I'm going, I'll have to keep on. That's living.

Catherynne M. Valente
I want to keep on living forever and watching heroes and fools and knights go up and down, into the world and out. I want to keep being myself and mind the work that minds me. Work is not always a hard thing that looms over your years. Sometimes, work is the gift of the world to the wanting.

Catherynne M. Valente