Quotes from Catherynne M. Valente

Love is what grown folk do to each other because the law frowns on killing.

My mistress used to say that you couldn't ever really be naked unless you wanted to be. She said: even if you've taken off every stitch of clothing, you still have your secrets, your history, your true name. It's quite difficult to be really naked. You have to work hard at it.

Everything in this place was livid and lurid and living, and when he loved her and hurt her all at once she lived, too, higher and harder than she had thought she could.

Marya supposed this was why no one asked after stolen fairy tale girls. What embarrassments they turn out to be. They grow tempers; they join the army; they need glasses. Who wants them?

Let it be over", she pleaded within herself. "Let it never have happened—any of it. Let me be young again, and the story just starting.

My old friends, you must help me! Tell me what it is that a girl does in the way that a spider weaves, so that Solace will not grow up to be the wrong sort of girl." We like the wrong sorts of girls, they wrote. They are usually the ones worth writing about.

It's my own little joke, even though the punchline is sadness. I think a joke like that is a present you make to yourself, so every time you say it, even if it hurts, you get a very cohesive feeling out of it, because the past you and the present you are talking to each other, and it's nice to have friends.

At the bottom of philosophy something very true and very desperate whispers: Everyone is hungry all the time. Everyone is starving. Everyone wants so much.. Everyone is hungry and not only for food - for comfort and love and excitement and the opposite of being alone. Almost everything awful anyone does is to get those things and keep them... Most often you have to make the world you want out of yourself

I got a heart like a half bottle of no-label whiskey. Nothing to brag on, but enough for you, and all your friends, too.

but you can't forbid a word, so there.

Is she happy? She doesn't understand. She has never considered it. It is possible to be so entirely happy you never ask the question. She is a full glass submerged in water. Neither nor both full and empty. The inquiry, though kind, has no meaning for her.

But the story is no good without a villain. It can't feel true without a villain. Otherwise, everything would already be as it ought to be, yes? Someone has to be at fault. And if you are the hero, it stands to reason that folk who do not look like you or talk like you or like to eat the same things you like to eat must be the villains. After all, the world is easy and simple, is it not?

This strange woman down in the dark kissed me and held me, and in between she whispered over and over: Shhh. It's okay. It's okay.

If she was in a teaching mood she wasn't in a hitting mood. Like sneezing and keeping your eyes open, Mrs. H couldn't do both at once.

Of course, one may have a number of other halves," Nor said with a grin. "We have always felt sorry for those who are forced to be only one person, forever and ever until they die. My brother and I are Neither/Nor, my sister and I are Not/Nor, and on and on the combinations go, sharing dreams and labor and life. We are halves, but we make an infinite whole.

Here's what you have to understand about intergalactic civil wars: they're functionally identical to the knockdown, door-slamming, plate-smashing, wall-penetrating, shriek-sobbing drama of any high-strung couple you've ever met.

He didn't even know how to talk about it. He had practiced not talking about the things he knew until no man could be called his equal.

You can't say no if you don't have desires and opinions and wants of your own. You wouldn't even want to. No is the heart of thinking.

I readied myself for the great effort of speaking with the throat-and-belly instead of the mind-and-heart. It is altogether a different skill.

The only price in the world that matters is the one that hurts to pay.

In war you must always choose sides. One or the other. Silver or black. Human or demon. If you try to be a bridge laid down between them, they will tear you in half.

All coral in every world think of Australia the way that you and I think of Mesopotamia - it is the ancestral paradise of their civilization and they send it Valentines each February.

A clever person is never bored, and a bored person is never clever.

Eternity takes forever.