Quotes from Catherynne M. Valente

Marya pinned out her childhood like a butterfly. She considered it the way a mathematician considers an equation.

Do you think I am a fool, Masha? All this time, and you speak to me as though I were a flighty pinprick of a girl. I am a magician! Did you never think, even once, that I loved lipstick and rouge for more than their color alone? I am a student of their lore, and it is arcane and hermetic beyond the dreams of alchemists. Did you never wonder why I gave you so many pots, so many creams, so much perfume?

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

The war is always going badly.

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.

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

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

I have to do it myself. That's what a Queen does. She saves herself.

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.

I just want to be the size of a galaxy so I can eat all the stars and gas giants without them noticing and getting upset. Is that so bad? Isn't that what love looks like? Isn't that what you want, too?

Let us be greedy together; let us hoard. Let us hit each other with birch branches and lock each other in dungeons; let us drink each other's blood in the night and betray each other in the sun. Let us lie and lust and take hundreds of lovers; let us dance until snow melts between us. Let us steal and eat until we grow fat and roll in the pleasures of life, clutching each other for purchase.

Histories are instruments of oppression.

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.

The future is a messy, motley business, little girl.

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.

I abandoned her. It's the one capital crime of fatherhood. Mothers can fail a thousand different ways. A father's only job is: do not abandon this child.

I still want to kiss you. To feel the life in you seize on the life in me. Raw and fresh and new.

She's an Italian flag in occupied territory, and I fall for her like Paris.

A story is a map of the world. A gloriously colored and wonderful map, the sort one often sees framed and hanging on the wall in a study full of plush chairs and stained-glass lamps: painstakingly lettered, researched down to the last pebble and participle, drawn with dash and flair, with cloud-goddesses in the corners and giant squid squirming up out of the sea...[T]here are more maps in the world than anyone can count. Every person draws a map that shows themselves at the center.

snow is the beginning and the end of everything...

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

Don't you ever feel like you're just a story someone is telling about someone like you?

Clothes are a story you choose to tell about yourself, a different one every day.

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