Quotes from Catherynne M. Valente

Music has more rules than math or magic and it's twice as dangerous as both or either.

Whenever one does extraordinary things, someone is bound to try to repeat them for themselves. It's the way of the world.

Never trust anyone under one hundred!

In Russian fairy tales, the narrative flows a little differently. In those stories, you won't find a tale for Cinderella, one for Snow White, one for Rapunzel. Instead, a peculiar cast of characters recurs over and over, in nearly every story, performing different acts and suffering different sorrows, but remaining the same. Ivan the Fool. Yelena the Bright. Baba Yaga. Vasilisa the Brave. Koschei the Deathless.

I wish for my child to have a mind as stark and wild as the winter, a spirit as clear and fine as my window, and a heart as red and open as my wounded hand.

Everyone cried when the creature first spoke to them. No, not cried. They wept. They wept like the cavemen of Lascaux suddenly transported into the Sistine Chapel just in time for a live performance of Phantom of the Opera as sung by Tolkien's elves.

You can be innocent again. It's not true, what they say, that you can never get it back. You can. It's only that most folk cannot be bothered.

Hey there," the steely abomination said with infinite, Buddha-like compassion, "it looks like you're trying to come to grips with the existence of events and entities far beyond your experience and, as a result, are currently undergoing a small, entirely understandable, psychological break. Would you like help?

The best way to be the kind of girl you want to be is to do what that girl would do.

Life is beautiful and life is stupid. This is, in fact, widely regarded as a universal rule not less inviolable than the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Uncertainty Principle, and No Post on Sundays.

Those were all big words, to be sure, but as has been said, September read often, and liked it best when words did not pretend to be simple, but put on their full armor and rode out with colors flying.

Once upon a time, a girl named September grew very tired indeed of her parents' house, where she washed the same pink-and-yellow teacups and matching gravy boats every day, slept on the same embroidered pillow, and played with the same small and amiable dog. Because she had been born in May, and because she had a mole on her left cheek, and because her feet were very large and ungainly, the Green Wind took pity on her and flew to her window one evening just after her twelfth birthday.

Are you the only human in the world then? And all of the rest of us monsters?

Shut up," hissed the Marquess. "I chose it, you miserable, rouged-up idiots! Why shouldn't I have a boy's title? People listen to boys! They fear boys—they fear a King and hope a Queen will show them mercy! Why shouldn't I be a Marquess? I rule the world! I say how things are pronounced! I say what belongs to boys and what doesn't!

Koschei brought you to me. You were so near death that ghosts crowded around you, weeping silver tears, waiting for you with such smiles. You humans, you know, whoever built you sewed irony into your sinews.

I have all the books I could need, and what more could I need than books? I shall only engage in commerce if books are the coin.

Did you never wonder why the old books are so full of dragons chasing after maidens? The serpents think the girls are orphans, and long to get them away in a lair so that they may grow up strong and tall.

I have to know, I have to or else you will just rule me until the end of everything because you know and I do not.

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

Once more September marveled that even the Dodo knew what she wanted to be when she was grown. She simply could not think what she herself might do. September expected that destinies, which is how she thought of professions, simply landed upon one like a crown, and ever after no one questioned or fretted over it, being sure of one's own use in the world. It was only that somehow her crown had not yet appeared. She did hope it would hurry up.

She often felt that she chased the ideal cup of coffee in her mind from table to table, the rich, thick, creamy coffee, spicy, bittersweet, that betrayed no hint of thinness or chemical flavoring, nothing less than total, fathomless devotion to the state of being itself. Every morning she pulled a delicate cup from its brass hook and filled it, hoping that it would be dark and deep and secret as a forest, and each morning it cooled too fast, had too much milk, stained the cup, made her nervous.

Still, I did love him. He never minded if I wore my pyjamas for a week and didn't brush my hair. That's a good quality to have in a man. Maybe the best a girl could hope for, considering. And, by Jove, he loves that child. Did you know you can fall in love with the way a man loves someone else? Love takes so much effort. You have to get up ever so early in the morning to really love someone properly.

People are mostly happiest when they think they're just about to get the thing they want most. Before and after, they're all monsters.

It's just that in detective stories, women are usually dead before the curtain goes up. In fairy tales, they're usually alive. Fairy tales are about survival. That's all they're about. The princess lives to get married in the last act. The detective solves the woman; the knight saves her. And really, really , when you put a fairy tale together with grime and despair and industrial angst you get the Gothic, and that's where we live, Percy.