Quotes from Catherynne M. Valente

The Leucrotta looked appraisingly at Leander for a long while. "My skin, you say? I had not heard that it had any medicinal value, but if the Witch needs it, I must, as a gentleman and a monster, yield to her." Both the Prince and the King started, shocked at the suggestion. "But we must have a battle!" insisted the Prince. "Don't be ridiculous, boy. I would eviscerate you within a minute. Just take the skin and scurry back.

You're looking very fine tonight, Grandmother! Why, you've hardly any warts at all! Bathing in blood again, I'll warrant. Virgins or capitalists this time?

Wishes get slimy, and their colors fade, and soon they are just mud, like all the rest of the mud, and not wishes at all, but regrets. The trouble is, not everyone can tell when they ought to launder their wishes. Even when one finds oneself in Fairyland and not at home at all, it is not always so easy to remember to catch the world in its changing and change with it.

Some who deserve failure do not achieve it," he sniffed. "Some who deserve nothing are given the world.

There is still a place in me, Masha, where my death once lay. I have a pain there, the way some men feel their legs long after they've been cut off at the knee. It is my pain, and I cannot share it. I would not, even if I could. I will age with you, if it will please you. I will match you, wrinkle for wrinkle, grey hair for grey hair, creak for creak, tumor for tumor. You will be so beautiful when you are old.

In my experience, folk find it nigh on impossible to call a thing what it is. It

Mabry Muscat looked pleadingly at Mallow, and she could not understand why they all obeyed him -- except that of course the King could eat them, and of course he was King, and did not people everywhere do more or less as they were told when someone with a crown did the telling?

She started disappearing as soon as she was born. Just to get away from you.

No matter how mad, bad, and dangerous to know a civilization gets, unto every generation are born the lonely and the uncool, destined to forever stare into the candy-store window of their culture, and loneliness is the mother of ascension.

I've always found chess to be a bit too much like real life to provide much enjoyment as a game.

Within the bowels of these elements, where we are tortured and remain for ever, The Labyrinth hath no limits, nor is circumscribed in one self place; for where we are is the Labyrinth, and where the Labyrinth is, there must we ever be. Hoo.

I do not want to muddle about with Politicks, and whenever two Folk of any sort are in a room together there are always Politicks to be muddled in.

they climbed their ladders to wheedle and prune the trees into holiness

Az ?rhajók borzasztóan hasznos és kellemes holmik, de szigorúan véve nem szükségesek a városban mászkáláshoz.

You are my treasure, my pale gold, the heart of my heart. You lie at the bottom of my being and gnaw upon my roots.

Except that her joints ached and her head hurt and it tasted like a vorcha had shit in her mouth.

It is not possible to posses so many colors and a hard heart.

Names aren't loners, they're connected, even in real life. You name your kids for someone dead or what you hope they will become or what you wish you were and your parents did the same to you and that big, glittering net of names tells the story of the whole world. Names are load-bearing struts. Names are destiny.

That's what a map is, you know. Just a memory. Just a wish to go back home - someday, somehow.

Secrets are delicate things. They can fill you up with sweetness and leave you like a cat who has found a particularly fat sparrow to eat and did not get clawed or bitten even once while she was about it. But they can also get stuck inside you, and very slowly boil up your bones for their bitter soup. Then the secret has you, not the other way around.

Your past's a private matter, sweetheart. You just keep it locked up in a box where it can't hurt anyone.

Lives have apocalypses, too. You just can't know when you're in it until the water is already closing over your head and all you can hear are volcanoes, one after the other, detonating the possibility of the future you imagined.

They don't know I'm beloved. But I know and that's plenty.

Music has more rules than math or magic and it's twice as dangers as both or either.