Quotes from Catherynne M. Valente

We spent a century closed up within four walls and a roof. We are claustrophobic. We prefer the sun and the wind and the sea though it bites some of us who are made of metal, and tears papery hearts.

Maybe [Snow White] never wakes up. More likely than anything else, really. You can't kiss a girl into anything.

They found themselves striding into the herald's square of a place called Mercutio before they could discuss whether it was nightingales or sparrows that sang so prettily in the woods.

You have to be able to see the world as a whole to bear it—to see the Queerness that moves in every bit of Fairyland, how it threads through every heart and field, how we are all bound together up in the Weird Well of the World.

You are a Witch. I am a Prince. In all the books, where there is a Witch and a Prince there is a way.

Goblins are well-rounded, though you'd never think it from the dastard tales folk tell of us. For example, I enjoy stamp collecting as well as haggling.

Once there was a girl who ate an apple not meant for her...Up until the apples, she had been living in a wonderful house in the wilderness, happy in her fate and her ways. She had seven aunts and seven uncles and a postdoctorate in anthropology.

September smiled at her wonderful friends in all their colors and bright eyes and gentle ways. "You know, in Fairyland-Above they said that the underworld was full of devils and dragons. But it isn't so at all! Folk are just folk, wherever you go, and it's only a nasty sort of person who thinks a body's a devil just because they come from another country and have different notions.

everything in the world is a boxing match in your heart, between Boldness and Not-Boldness. You let them holler inside you and wallop each other with Arguments For and Against. Then you end by betting on one or the other and that's how things get decided.

But I shall choose to remember you, and it would be nice if it went both ways. That's how it generally goes in my country." But does it? September thought. If a body is hurt, they try to forget the person who hurt them and never think about the pain again.

You can't get into the real meat of hatred and eternal enmity without love and betrayal, without that, it's just an argument with occasional gun music. The good stuff, the all-obliterating all-annihilating one-for-the-novels mano-a-mano crackling on the pork roast, that has to come, as the hermits will tell you, from attachment.

Now, there are important rules in Fairyland, rules from which I shall one day be exempt, when my papers have been processed at last and I am possessed of the golden ring of diplomatic immunity.

Kid, nobody really gets anywhere in this life. Everybody just picks someplace to hunker down and barricade themselves in. Some of us just got better bricks than others.

She got, instead, a towering confection that might have thought about becoming a sandwich at one point, but had gotten greater ambitions along the way.

It's like Goguenar's Fourth General Unkillable Fact says: Everyone's always saying love is the element that binds the universe together, but that's a load of bollocks; It's convenience.

The point's not what it costs; it's what it costs you. Everything you have. That's my price, that's my prize, that's my ransom, and that's my rune. The only price in the world that matters is the one that hurts to pay.

8. Santa Claus is concerned about the problem of Arctic ice. The ice is the spouse of the elves, and she is sick. She is the primary source of their magic, as the elves cannot be separated from the place where they live. For many years now, this is all they have asked for for Christmas: that the ice should come back

I shall be as brave as a my Toad, he thought, for my Toad never hides under the bed when she is afraid of lightning or bats. She sticks out her tongue and eats them.

It's like Great-Aunt Goguenar's Sixth Unkillable Fact: 'Everything just gets so fucked up sometimes and the natural resting state of reality is not to make any goddamned sense if it can help it and you've just got to accept that because it's not going to get any better from here on in.'

I have tried to be a generous narrator and care for my girl as best I can. I cannot help that readers will always insist on adventures...

What was the point of a world without debilitating bitterness and despair? How could you even tell you were alive? How could you possibly write a decent pop song if you weren't a sad sack of tissues or at least fundamentally angry at the world most of the time?

It is unutterably boring, the multitudes in progression from innocence to inkling to knowledge to the inevitable apotheosis of desperation.

She drank like a Czar and sang like a broken squeezebox and danced like the Sugarplum Fairy cutting loose at last

When you can change something just by saying a word, that is magic.