Quotes from Catherynne M. Valente

And indeed, as night drew on the sky like a bodice, lacing it with the last beams of sunlight,

A tongue is very like a gun, which is why they nearly rhyme. Both can be fired to devastating effect, for good or evil, and both can explode in your hands, wounding your comrades instead of your enemies.

I do believe everyone in Fairyland-Below is royalty!" September exclaimed. "Queens and Princes and Vicereines and Emperors - it's like visiting Europe!

In future days you will call John Mandeville a liar, and my shade will laugh at you and say: true, true, I was, but not always, not so. When the world was good enough in my sight, when it behaved as wildly and gorgeously as I always knew it could, I told the truth of it.

What happens to anything beautiful? Viy ate it up.

How long was it, between the time when you were happy, and the time when you wanted to kill him?

She is so stubborn her heart has an argument with her head every time it wants to beat.

A Bank is but a college of Fiscal Magic.

It's different. When you make a house good and strong because it's your house, a place you made, a place you're proud of, it's not at all the same as making it glow for someone who ordered you to do it.

Things I Will Try to Say More Often: Why? I love you. I'm sorry. May I have chocolate? Yes. yes. yes.

We were just holes, after all, holes filled up with light, and deep in our secret hearts we worried that we were an accident,

Isn't that cheating? Tfu! She expects you to cheat! Masha, whom I love: These tasks do not test your strength or your wiliness; they test your ability to cheat, which is the truest measure of a devil. They are designed to be impossible if you play fair.

A good, solid, beefy lie is too heavy to stand on its own. It needs smaller, quicker, more complicated lies to hold it up.

I've come to think you only get so much bravery in one lifetime and if you spend it too soon, you're all out of fuck it all to hell by the time you really need it.

It is not the sea that calls us back. What calls us is stronger and more inexorable than any current. I long for the sea, yes… but more, I long for the leaving. I am restless, I am ready, and the leaving whispers to me at night. It says that I will breathe easier when the air is full of fog and seagulls, that I will breathe easier when I am at the start of a story, rather than at the end.

The ender dragon chortled. It sounded like thunder broken across the knee of the world. I am the infinite lightning night-lizard at the end of the universe. I am the master of time and death. The fire of creation is my youngest brother. In my stomach, galaxies churn in cosmic acid and are digested into meaninglessness. ED opened one vast violet eye. You can't fool me with a pumpkin, dummy.

She wasn't angry. You can't get angry just because the world's so much bigger than you and you're stuck in it.

There are no tigers for us, just a city, waiting, and it loves us, in whatever ways a city can love.

You know how questing goes. You can't explain it to anyone else; it would be like telling them your dreams.

I can't even say her name. She doesn't even have a name. She is she . She is her . She possesses the pronoun so completely that no one else can touch it. There is only one her in the great stinking gas giant of my heart, fifty feet high. She is a giantess. I am no one. Well, not "no one". I am Anchises St. John. But I am no one's him .

No, love, in real life you can get all the way to death and never have finished one single story.

It is good that you ruined your face, because it brought you to me, but also because beautiful women rarely work strong magic.

No, my son. Not she. I . I lay on the rocks and the sun gnawed at my flesh. I pleaded for my life with a useless stump of a tongue. I watched your precious Cveti close up my severed breasts in a silver box. And I listened to the soldiers praise her false name—Ghyfran! Ghyfran! The whore who betrayed her god for power. This body is new, but I am Ragnhild, first of my name, and I am the plague which will burn through the marrow of the Anointed City.

This is how you learn to see: You put together a crew. No one can see a damn thing clearly with only two eyes.