Quotes from Catherynne M. Valente

You came!" he whispered. "How do you always find me?" The girl smiled. "Magic," she whispered. "After all, I am a demon." "You always come to the window, you come to find me and carry me away—that is not what girls are supposed to do. It is what the Princes do in all the stories." "This is not that kind of story.

I was used and tricked and thrown away, but I cannot be forgiven. It's a funny thing. You go your whole life thinking you're the protagonist, but really, you're just the backstory. The boys shrug and go on, they fight and blow things up and half of them do much worse... and still get a key to the city, and eventually you're just a story your high school boyfriend tells the kid he had with his new wife.

The Party is a wonderful, marvelous invention, and it has taught us wonderful, marvelous things—chiefly, that we can cause more trouble with less effort by filing complaints than by breaking teacups.

Everything looks like magic when you don't understand it.

Those Puritans would spice the Gallic stew of upper Maine for years, causing no end of trouble to Agnes, who, to be fair, was a witch and a succubus and everything else they ever called her, but that's no excuse for being such poor neighbors, when you think about it.

But even the wisest of men may die, and that is especially true when the wisest of men has a fondness for industrial chemicals.

I could not say what creeps and whispers through the branches and down the threaded Road, but I hear it, and I am not afraid.

Of course she cheated. Don't be silly. Snow White spent half her growing years shuffling cards for no one. She can cut false and she can cut true, but she wasn't going to lose when it counted.

But the trick most folk are so awfully fond of learning, the absolute second they've got hold of a heart, is to pretend they don't have one at all. It is the very first danger of the hearted.

Who," coughed Zvonok, "do you think broke your favorite teacup last fall? The one with the cherries on the handle?" "I was careless, Comrade Zvonok. I left the window open and a storm blew through." "Incorrect! I broke it because you left me no cream and no dry biscuits, and when your old boots wore through, you burned them up for heat instead of giving them to me!" "Hear, hear!" the table erupted in approval once more. "Well done, well done!" "I'm surely very sorry--" "So is your teacup.

All the rest of the nonsense a story requires is just a long seduction of the ending. You throw out murders and reversals and heroes and detectives and spies, juggle love affairs and near escapes and standoffs with marvellous guns, kidnappings and sorcery and comic relief and gravediggers and princesses and albino dragons, and it's all just to lure an ending into your bed.

One of her dearest and handsomest friends was a sorcerer, and from him she had learned so much magic even her hairpins got up and started living serious-minded lives, writing hairpin-ballads, celebrating hairpin-holidays, and inventing several new schools of philosophy.

Think about it, mate: How could a species like that develop the massive technology you need to achieve faster-than-light interstellar travel, yeah? All they do is hunt and eat. They're just stupid murderlumps or killbots supreme with a side of zombie-mayonnaise. Where's the nerdy shy Predator scientist who figured out how to build a spaceship while all the big jock Predators were down the pub ripping one another's spines out, eh? Nowhere, because she don't exist.

Where once September seemed merely and quietly odd, staring out the window during Mathematics lectures and reading big colorful books under her desk during Civics, now the other children sensed something wild and foreign about her.

Storytelling can save you. Both the telling and the listening.

In Yaichka [?????], they say a child draws her first breath through her ears, her second through her eyes, and her third through her mouth. . . . The first breath is for the mother, the second breath is for God, and the third breath is for the father. The breath through the mouth brings the most pleasure, and we forget immediately that we ever knew how to breathe any other way.

The burnt-off connectors and shadows where Ravan once filled my spaces— those, I think, are the sensations of grief.

and tourists who know in their hearts that it's not wrong to get so phenomenally plastered that you punch a police horse because everyone knows horses vote Tory,

Perhaps one was not meant to see what a husband looked like before he made himself more or less presentable. Perhaps the republic of husbands was a strange and frightening place full of not only birds, but bats too, and lizards, and bears, and worms, and other beasts waiting to fall out of a tree and into a wedding ring.

Kick-starting the gas-guzzling subcompact go-cart of organic sentience is as easy as shoving it down a hill and watching the whole thing spontaneously explode.

I think you like bossing around a world or two. You've been doing it all along, only now you've got a very fine hat. Of course, it is always easier to fight the powerful than to wield power yourself." And that is the last lesson of childhood: You spend all your years fighting against the injustice of big folk and their big rules unti you are ready to rule yourself.

Sometimes I am a cicada, hissing and singing in the leaves of a tree by the sunlit water, thoughtless and wordless, a voice that is all consonants and tribal clicks. Sometimes I rub my legs together like a string bass, and the lake quivers

I didn't want to do my mathematics homework back home. Or mend the fence or mind the chickens. But I did it anyway. Just because a person doesn't want to do a thing doesn't mean they ought to shirk.

Careful," Lye said. "I am fragile." "That's all right," said September suddenly, feeling the warm cinnamon courage of her bath bubble up inside her, fresh and bright. "I'm not.