Quotes from Catherynne M. Valente

You gotta be nice to strangers even when they are the worst, because they don't know you well enough to understand how shut your big face can mean I've missed you more than the whole world can know .

Everything in the universe has rhythm. Everything pulses to a beat laid down by the Big Bang. Everything feels the drumline of creation from star to sex to song.

How much better if life were more like books, if life lied a little more, and gave up its stubborn and boring adherence to the way things can be, and thought a little more imaginatively about the way things might be.

Everybody is bizarre and disgusting and interesting and fixated on fetishes they wouldn't admit to their grandmother on pain of vaporization and worthy of love. You are bizarre and disgusting and interesting and fixated on fetishes you wouldn't admit to your grandmother on pain of vaporization and worthy of love.

She'd thought she left feeling helpless behind long ago - only we never leave helpless behind. It is a country in which we all hold passports.

She's an old woman possessed of great powers--but aren't all old women possessed of great powers? Occupational hazard, I think.

Fairyland is a very Scientifick place. We subscribe to all the best journals.

You get the face you build your whole life, with work and loving and grieving and laughing and frowning.

Some small ones learn to stitch together a Coat of Scowls or a Scarf of Jokes to hide their Hearts. Some hammer up a Fort of Books to protect theirs.

you lot would rather watch someone suffer untold horrors than watch them enjoy so much as a cool drink if you don't have two of your own, and yours have cherries in them as well as more ice and little paper umbrellas, and even then most of you would still prefer to take theirs and have three. This is not the behavior of a sentient race.

She who invented words, and yet does not speak; she who brings dreams and visions, yet does not sleep; she who swallows the storm, yet knows nothing of rain or wind. I speak for her; I am her own.

The great blessing and great cruelty of youth is that there seems to be time enough.

The trouble with lies is that they love company. Once you tell a single lie, that lie gets terribly excited and calls all its friends to visit. Soon you find yourself making room for them in every corner, turning down beds and lighting lamps to make them comfortable, feeding them and tidying them and mending them when they start to wear thin.

I am not a little girl anymore, dazzled by your magic. It is my magic, now, too.

One of the many quotes on love..."Love can come only with time and sentience. We learn it as we learn language--and some never learn it well. Love is like a tool, though it is not a tool; something strange and wonderful to use, difficult to master, and mysterious in its provenance.

In addition to all the other kinds of magic there is Yes Magic and No Magic, and Mallow is wonderful fierce at No Magic. Sometimes that is the last magic you can hold on to, when all the rest has gone.

It's not a game if you don't cheat, it's just two sods making a mess with fifty-two pieces of paper.

The nearness of him crushed her, like being held by the sun.

All children are heartless. They have not grown a heart yet, which is why they can climb tall trees and say shocking things and leap so very high that grown-up hearts flutter in terror.

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.

She had a highly developed sense of humor which in some lights looked a bit like a sense of justice.

RULES OF FAIRYLAND-BELOW BEWARE OF DOG ANYTHING IMPORTANT COMES IN THREES AND SIXES DO NOT STEAL QUEENS A GIRL IN THE WILD IS WORTH TWO IN CHAINS NECESSITY IS THE MOTHER OF TEMPTATION EVERYTHING MUST BE PAID FOR SOONER OR LATER WHAT GOES DOWN MUST COME UP

If he lost everything else, pride, priapism, and producer credit, Decibel Jones would never, never give up his swagger.

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