Quotes from Catherynne M. Valente

A silent Library is a sad Library. A Library without patrons on whom to pile books and tales and knowing and magazines full of up-to-the-minute politickal fashions and atlases and plays in pentameter! A Library should be full of exclamations!

Now, in the Kingdom of School, to be asked into another child's room is like being asked inside their heart.

all witches must keep up a certain level of deviance in their personal lives, or we should be expelled from the union.

Things that cannot long be kept secret: death in the family, the loss of a ring, corruption of the spirit, boredom, illicit love. Sickness. Addiction. Pregnancy.

Hounds and hearthstones, girl, haven't you ever heard a story about Koschei? He's only got the one. Act one, Scene one: pretty girl. Act one, Scene two: pretty girl gone!

I was better than a punk. I was a protaganist.

Heroes in motion tend to stay in motion, but villains in motion tend toward mass destruction.

When spring comes, I shall meet you at the Municipal Library, and you will see how much I've learned! You'll be so proud of me and love me so!' 'Oh, Ell, but I do love you! Right now!' 'One can always bear more love,' the Wyverary purred.

I'm not goddamned mermaid either, so don't get any ideas about shell-bras or selling my voice to a sea-witch. That little idiot deserved to die. Never give up your voice for a man, you fucking guppy.

Opium ain't got nothing on the promise of tomorrow turning up better than today. Snow

horses, in secret, love hats more than any other creature. It is a horse's tragedy that they can never properly wear one.

Tell it fast before you get scared and silence yourself.

The Land of Parents is strange and full of peril.

And the answer is: You are wrong. The Faeries are not gone. But they are no longer what they were. I watched it and did not help them, though I could have. I cheered. I cheered and I wept and I was glad. Perhaps I should not have been. Perhaps laughing at agony is a Fairy's game and I should not have moved my pieces on their board.

Bad luck relies absolutely on perfect timing

I don't see where you get off fretting about whether or not the end of the world is family-friendly.

Temperament, you'll find, is highly dependent on time of day, weather, frequency of naps, and whether one has had enough to eat. The

Funniest thing about love, how it shakes loose when no one's looking. How the dark helps it along. Maybe that's why we dug caves so much, way back when.

everything living has a mouth. Mouths bite and swallow; they talk; they taste. They kiss. A mouth is the main tool for living.

This is some hard-core, triple-X, keep-it-in-the-back-room-under-a-curtain, Alice in Wonderland action is what this is," Decibel said with total delight.

But luck can be spent, like money; and lost, like a memory; and wasted, like a life. If

I could speak by then, but neither of us thought it my best trick. Very often my exchanges with Ceno went something like: Sing me a song, Elefsis. The temperature in the kitchen is 21.5 degrees Celsius and the stock of rice is low. (Long pause.) Ee-eye-ee-eye-oh.

Any story told is a lie cunningly told to hide the real world from the poor bastards who live in it.

Who knows what wild things Sleeping Beauty dreamt of while waiting to awake?