Quotes from Catherynne M. Valente

The ghosts will eat everything because the bellies of ghosts want the whole world, just to fill one tiny corner.

A heart can learn ever so many tricks, and what sort of beast it becomes depends greatly upon whether it has been taught to sit up or to lie down, to speak or to beg, to roll over or to sound alarms, to guard or to attack, to find or to stay

Then we'd go to sleep and dream the same dreams. We always dreamed the same dreams, which was like living twice.

The Sirens flicked their wings at the wall, inscribing it with their own blue ink: Even in penance is beauty; blessed are all the ocean's drowned!

Is she very terrible?" The Green Wind frowned into his brambly beard. "All little girls are terrible, " he admitted finally, "but the Marquess, at least, has a very fine hat.

A stepmother is like a bullet you can't dig out. She fires true and she fires hot and she fires so quick that her metal hits your body before you even know there's a fight on.

Everyone says they only hate me because I annihilated hope and butchered our future, but I know better, and anyway, it's a lie. Some people are just born to be despised. The Loathing of Tetley began small and grew bigger and bigger, like the Thames, until it swallowed me whole.

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

Tell me a tale in which a woman is wed, and she is happy." The boy's lip trembled, and there was pity in him like a stranging vine. He knelt at Dinarzad's bare feet, and held her hands in his. "I do not know any stories like that", he whispered.

A child equals the mass of Fairyland times the speed of luck squared.

why worry about a thing that may never come to pass? Do not ruin today with mourning tomorrow.

he did love her, even if it was beef-love: stupid and tough and overcooked.

Some kinds of hurt almost feel good, you know? Familiar. Like an ugly couch in your parents' house with the springs all bare where your daddy slapped you once for coming home late and now when you sleep on it it's like one of those Indian fellas napping on nails but it makes you feel like you come from somewhere. Hurts like home.

Up to no good may mean up to something interesting!

At the end of every adventure, you must ask if it was ever really your adventure at all. Perhaps you were only an obstacle in someone else's quest.

Perhaps my philosophy is not so sophisticated. It goes: Come inside. I love you. A Whelk's love will grow as big as it's allowed.

But something older and wiser within her said, Some things are for hiding and for keeping.

Things which are gone in the morning: sleep, darkness, grief, the moon. Women. Dreams.

You will live as you live in any world,' Madame Lebedeva said. She reached out her hand as if to grasp Marya's, as if to press it to her cheek, then closed her fingers, as if Marya's hand were in hers. 'With difficulty, and grief.

Lawlessness doesn't mean there's no law, you know, it just means that there are a lot of different laws slugging it out in the streets, and none of them have come out on top yet.

But it feels so good to be held, it feels so good to be spoken to like she is capable and wise, to hear her life gain weight, fed by Cascavel. Fed by being seen.

One is always homesick for places where one came to grief.

there is only this world, as it is now, and there has never been another, can never be any other.

And in my dream, if the fathers and mothers loved their sons and daughters and sang to them in their cradles, they made a good country, and if they didn't, they made a tyranny, so whether existence is a bloodbath or a bubble bath could hinge on whether a little child got kissed good night with a story and a glass of water or sent to bed without snuggles or a snack or a cohesive philosophy of justice.