Quotes from Catherynne M. Valente

Baba Yaga whirled on her, the tails of her fur coat whipping around. "Don't you call me comrade, little girl. We aren't equals and we aren't friends. Chairman Yaga. That comrade nonsense is just a hook by which the low pull down the high. And then what do you get? Everyone rolling around in the same shit, like pigs.

SOMEONE IS APPROACHING THE SHIP. SOMEONE BIG. HATE. HATE. HATE. HATE. I WILL BITE THEM. I WILL. LET ME BITE THEM. YOU WILL NOT BE SORRY. EVERYTHING WILL BE BETTER IF I BITE THEM. TRUST GRUMPO. GOOD BOY GRUMPO.

You are the only member of this Sleepwalker team with formal medical training, Specialist Yorrik. "Wry self-deprecation: I am a pediatric allergist. Auditory, olfactory, esophageal." Anax Therion and Senna stared at him. "In sheepish explanation: Ear, nose, and throat. I do sniffles.

Why is it safe for you and not for me?" whispered Marya Morevna. "Because you're still a girl." The vintovnik grinned. "Girls have to obey rules. Chyerti break them.

She always gave the impression of having accidentally wandered in from a mad scientist's conference, and felt rather desperate to get back.

She didn't like to say things flatly, but sometimes it is the perfect antidote to someone trying to convince you the noose in their hand is a lovely silk ribbon for your hair.

First Law of Heroics." The Monaciello grinned up at a confused September. "Someone has to tell you it's impossible, or the Quest can't go on.

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." He thought about it for a moment. "If you're my father you bet

I know real dirt looks nothing like this. Nothing like soft blood flecked with black bone.

I did not see the appeal of a wife. We had never had one before. She would not be half as interesting as our buffalo.

Of course, we would like to tell her which. But no one may know the shape of the tale in which they move. And, perhaps, we do not truly know what sort of beast it is, either. Stories have a way of changing faces. They are unruly things, undisciplined, given to delinquency and the throwing of erasers. This is why we must close them up into thick, solid books, so they cannot get out and cause trouble.

Everything in creation is just a trick of the light - the only difference between heaven and hell is who's running those lights, who's got the switch, who knows the cues.

September suddenly realized something. "But Ell, Orrery begins with O! How can you know so much about it?" The Wyverary soared high, his neck stretching into a long red ribbon, full of words and pies and relief and flying. "I'm growing up!" he cried.

It was closing in on midnight, the kind of midnight you only get on Uranus after a three day bender. Ultramarine fog reeking of ethanol and neon and some passing whore's rosewater. Snow piled up like bodies in tbhe street. Twenty-seven moons lighting up what ought to be a respectable witching hour so you can't help but see yourself staring back in every slick glowpink skyscraper.

Ceno's brain, soft and pink with blood - and veined with endless whorls and branches of sapphire threaded through every synapse and neuron, inextricable, snarled, intricate, terrible, fragile and new.

A basic moral imperative is in play here. If you can protect a child, you must.

It's the most marvelous and terrible thing in the world. Everyone, but everyone, is pretending to be someone else.

A house is a kind of box you put a girl in.

We always dreamed the same dreams, which was like living twice.

Everyone cried when the creature first spoke to them. No, not cried. They wept. They wept like the cavemen of Lascaux suddenly transported into the Sistine Chapel just in time for a live performance of Phantom of the Opera as sung by Tolkien's elves. Their senses simply were not built for this, weren't meant to come anywhere near this kind of velvet-barreled sensory shotgun, loaded for bear.

I suppose if you have ten children one of them might go into government, which is the same as losing a child really.

I'm an extra in your story. Well, you're an extra in mine, boy.

He was the one who'd come back to life not fifteen minutes ago. Whenever he got sick at home, Aunt Elizabeth and Tabitha made a tremendous fuss with hot water bottles and tinctures and sweets and kisses. It only stood to reason that they should all make an extra-tremendous fuss now. After all, when you rose from the grave in England, people tended to make whole religions out of you.

It's the Sea of Restlessness," he said. "Fills you up with go go go, like you're a bowl full of reaching and wanting but you don't know what you're reaching and wanting for.