Quotes from Catherynne M. Valente

Falling in love is embarrassing. It is not hardcore. It is not part of the scene.

And there's nothing wrong with spinsters, anyway. They have nice cats and little bowls full of candy. Mrs. Bailey and Mrs. Newitz are the kindest ladies you'll ever meet, and they have nips of whiskey in their tea like cowboys.

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!

What's the difference between being dead and having a boyfriend? Death sticks around.

Of all the Fairy strangeness she had known, this seemed suddenly both the strangest and least strange of all. How she would have liked to be looked after like that, cared for and watched over. And yet at the same time, she understood the Whelk, and wished she could grow big enough to hold on to everyone she loved at once. To keep them safe and with her always and know their secret needs well enough to answer them.

The Sibyl Slant stared out of her slit eyes, the disc of her face showing no feeling at all. "Do you suppose you will look the same when you are an old woman as you do now? Most folk have three faces—the face they get when they're children, the face they own when they're grown, and the face they've earned when they're old.

We can't go back, not ever, not even for a minute. We are so lucky. Life is so good. We're going on and being alive and being shitty sometimes and lovely sometimes just the same as we always have, and only a Fuckwit couldn't see that.

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

That is the trouble with standing up to people, of course. Once you start doing it, you can hardly stop.

I want to be myself again. I want to be six. I want to stop knowing everything I know.

The oligarchs do not care what justice is, only what seems just. They do not care what mercy is, only what appears merciful. Thus justice and mercy will always escape them.

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

Shadows are where magic comes from. Your dark and dancing self, slipping behind and ahead and around, never quite looking at the sun.

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

What happens to the West happens to Snow White, which is to say they both turn into jokes.

Do you know what a thirteen-year-old girl can do when she is alone and frightened and believes she is right?

Still life is boring. Never stand still! Jumping bean life!

And in her long nights, in her long house of smoke and miller's stones, she baked the bread we eat in dreams, strangest loaves, her pies full of anguish and days long dead, her fairy-haunted gingerbread, her cakes wet with tears.

Endings are lush and lascivious, Vince; they call to me. All spread out on satin inevitabilities, waiting, beckoning, promising impossibly, obscenely elegant solutions—if you've been a good lad and dressed the house just so, for its comfort, for its arousal. All the rest of the nonsense a story requires is must a long seduction of the ending.

We are halves, but we make an infinite whole.

You come and go, vanish and appear. You miss years that go by for us, and we miss years that go by for you. We never know when we will find you again, or if we will. You meet us out of order, and sometimes I'll be older and sometimes you will be because that's the kind of story we're in. It's all jumbled up on the outside, but it all makes sense in your head. It all flows the right way in your heart.

It's in our blood—we heard their distresses like a rung bell in our bones.

That's the only way to look at things, I always say," propounded the Duke. "Slantways, sideways, and upside down.

I've always had enough, even if my enough and your enough are as different as an elephant and a minaret.