Quotes from Catherynne M. Valente

The Queen of a distant land fell in love with a bull. Nevermind how odd that sounds! The ancient world was as appalling place.

love may unclose itself between any number of seemingly upside-down and turned-around folk.

You took my will." "So all seductions go. One will presented to another, wrapped in a bow. The question is always who is to take and who is to give.

Doesn't sound like anyone cares about Rightful until they want to kick someone else out of the chair.

Magic is just a word for what's left to the powerless once everyone else has eaten their fill.

You carry your death in every cell of you. Every tiny mote in your body is dying, faster than sleight of hand. You are always dying, every second. How could I take that out of you?

It's Survival of Them Who's Best at Nicking Things, girl!

Dreams keep the heart alive.

Opium ain't got nothing on the promise of tomorrow turning up better than today.

I will tell you how we made soup in those days: Hold a ration card over a pot of boiling water for thirty minutes, so that the shadow of the card falls on the broth. Then eat it up, and don't you dare spill a drop.

The sweetness of it all is sharpest when placed alongside sorrow, close as knife and fork. But it is my job to interrogate your happiness, to prod its corners, to make sure it holds. When a sadness chews at the bottom of your heart, it's as though you walk all day with your dress on backwards, the buttons facing the forest, the collar facing the village. To everyone else, all may seem normal, but my eyes are so keen.

You were so near death that ghosts crowded around you, weeping silver tears, waiting for you with such smiles. You humans, you know, whoever built you sewed irony into your sinews. Sometimes, when a person has starved nearly to nothing, feeding them will hurt them worse than starving did, and push them the rest of the way over into dead.

What is the purpose of a Fairyland if everything lovely is outlawed, just like in the real world?

Towns can be cruel and vicious -- and sorry. In the wood, in the clearing, in the sun, we will one day find and crown her and keep her: our own witch, the witch of Wiscasset, the Blueberry Queen of Maine.

September read often, and liked it best when words did not pretend to be simple, but put on their full armor and rode out with colors flying.

Only a fool is so innocent as to think he can measure up to a woman's first love.

People are clocks who think they wind themselves.

Their happiness was the kind which is fashioned of the comfortable disorder of sauvignon bottles and coffee cups in the sink, paperback thrillers with split spines on the nightstand, bathrobes hung haphazard on high-backed, brocade-seated chairs, shutters left open all night, and the hallway ever in need of new paint.

Only the uncool have the requisite alone time to advance their species. And so it was that, eventually, between drawing meatship schematics in the dirt and dreaming of a world where she didn't hate literally everyone, the shiest and most sensitive of Yurtmaks began to plan the most ambitious massacre in the history of the galaxy: the murder of stupidity.

I was born a girl in a world of Branwells, but I shall be more than I am meant.

Jax stood up straight and clapped his hands together. "Welp," he announced, "I'm bored. This is stupid and I'm bored.

I began my life as a character in my father's films.

Calpurnia squinted through her goggles and thought to herself, That is a Key. Where there is a Key, there is yet hope.

This is not a lie: Memory has the taste and texture of cooked meat. Eat it and live. Remember, but only what it is licit to remember. In Aerograd, the word for meat and memory are the same.