Quotes from Catherynne M. Valente

where there's a labyrinth, there's a minotaur, and vice versa! I can't imagine a decent maze that would be caught dead without a minotaur.

Oh, Marya Morevna! Do you know how the church-folk call me, me and my daughter Gamayun, when they paint us on their ceilings? They call us archangels, and say that we live in heaven, where no vine of sorrow or memory grows. That is where I sent you, not to heaven—tscha! I know nothing of that place. But to a place like the ceiling of a church.

When you are this hungry, you cannot even remember who you used to be, she whispered. Who you might have been, if not for the hunger.

War must always be done out of sight, it shocks people and they stop immediately.

Being Necessary is food no less than cabbages and strawberry pies.

Being a troll, he loved the earth. A troll's love for the earth is a peculiar thing—it is something like the way you and I love our parents and our dogs and our favorite novels and the stuffed rabbits we have had since we were in our cradles and the very best thing we have ever done with our own two hands, all smashed up together in a rough, enormous ball of feeling the size of a planet.

Because the opposite of fascism isn't anarchy, it's theater.

In a city by the sea that was certainly never called anything so bourgeois as St. Petersburg, there stood a long, thin house on a long, thin street.

The Fairies called it a paw because they wanted to believe I was an animal-and not the sort of animal that discusses junkyard philosophy and enjoys Turkish coffee and knows Bone Magic and holds down a mortgage, no, the kind you can cut up for meat and only feel bad about it on Fridays. It's easier to use somebody if you can think of them as mute and dumb and made for your pleasure.

Be a good neighbor and you will have good neighbors

Hats change everything. September knew this with all her being, deep in the place where she knew her own name, that her mother would still love her even though she hadn't waved good-bye. For one day, her father had put on a hat with golden things on it and suddenly he hadn't been her father anymore, he had been a soldier, and he had left. Hats have power. Hats can change you into someone else.

A body can only deliver up the truth its bones know, Its blood, which is its history.

All our precontact simulations categorized you as a Down-to-Clown Unflappable Guy Who Can Handle This Sort of Thing No Problem with a high probability of Being Actually into It All the Way.

Almanack's deep green eyes shone. "Is it? Have you done a long, hard thing for the sake of someone you loved, so long and so hard that your body shook with the difficulty of it, that you were thirsty and aching and ravenous by the time it was done, but it did not matter, you did not even feel the thirst or the pain or the hunger, because you were doing what was Necessary?" "Yes," September whispered.

Check your pockets, my chimney-child.

Actors are liars. Writers, too. The whole lot of them, even the horn players and the fortune-tellers and the freaks and the strongmen. Even the ladies with rings in their noses and high heels on their feet playing violins all along the Pier and the lie they are all singing and dancing and saying is We can get the old world back again .

Yet humanity could not conceive. It tried and tried, and called mighty wizards from every corner of its earthly kingdom, but no child came. Many mourned, and said that a child was a terrible idea to begin with, ...

But no one may know the shape of the tale in which they move. And, perhaps, we do not truly know what sort of beast it is, either. Stories have a way of changing faces. They are unruly things, undisciplined, given to delinquency and the throwing of erasers. This is why we must close them up into thick, solid books, so they cannot get out and cause trouble.

What is a map, but a thing that gets you where you're going? -Mr. Map

I asked a queen once why she didn't want me. She wasn't a powerful queen, not a monarch of Spain or of Albania. Just a little kingdom of nowhere, but she married well and she had a crown. The queen of nowhere looked at me with her clear grey eyes and said: "Because I don't want to be in a story." Princesses usually grow up to be queens. The cleverness sticks long after the beauty goes.

For witches, there is but one King and one Palace—the one who has wronged them, and the house in which he lives. In fairness, Kings are often quite as dense, calling themselves sacred vessels and masters of all things above and below when in fact they command a few patches of lonely dirt with even lonelier houses sitting upon them.

I expect everyone in Boston has something like that ring, which is why I am glad I have never been to Boston.

What matters is entertainment. Eternity takes forever. The infinite expanse of time just does not know when to quit. The dead fear boredom the way mortals fear death.

I remember she sang the opening aria from Her Last Nocturne and I saw the night sky pour out of her mouth. Every time I wemt to hear her sing afterward, even months afterward, I saw the same thing. Blackness and stars flooding her mouth and splashing onto the boards in great gouts. Galaxies and the void dripping off her chin. Her teeth burning. I told her about it on a night in December and she whispered I know it, baby. I see it, too. That's my insides coming out.