Quotes from Catherynne M. Valente

It was only a dream. Sometimes they say that, at the end of stories, in the land where Milo was born. And then I woke up—it was only a dream. Stories here do not end like that. I cannot wake up. I do not sleep.

The first two human beings to set foot on another world stepped out of the jelly-hatch and into the warm, ever-so-slightly joy-coloured light of Litost's twin suns, which the Klavaret refer to collectively as Our Mums.

It was not going Frankie's way. Talking to Zelda felt like talking to a radio. It talked back, but you couldn't call it a conversation.

She knew very well what became of Princesses, as Princesses often get books written about them. Either terrible things happened to them, such as kidnappings and curses and pricking fingers and getting poisoned and locked up in towers, or else they just waited around till the Prince finished with the story and got around to marrying her. Either way, September wanted nothing to do with Princessing

You can't blame a book for its story.

So a half-breed goatsnake, a Yith, and a Ghast walk into a bar.

Astolaine Bombast, catalogue woman, ordered up like a rare steak, 'plees make shore she is pritty and a whyt gurl if you have enny'. Well, she's pritty enough for homesteading but takes no ribbons at the fair. After three dead babies that fellow wanted his money back, pack her up in a box and ship her east to the wife factory.

It's just a job. Why do boys have to make everything sound weird? It's not a robot until you put a girl inside. Sometimes I feel like that. A junkyard the Company forgot to put a girl in.

Can you imagine what it would do to a person, to know that they were standing between three people and that marrow-deep, desperate need?

I always die at the end," he whispers, and he is afraid now, his hands shaking. "It is always like this. It is never easy".

though you can have grief without adventures, you cannot have adventures without grief.

Let us say I am something like a witch, and something like a jester, and something like a mother.

Oh!" cried the young man. "A little deaf child! How sweet! We should adopt her and teach her to write symphonies. She'll be all the rage in town. I'll buy her a powdered wig and a tricorne!

How much easier, to be hard, bright and heartless. Instead, a very adult thing was happening in that green, new heart. For there are two kinds of forgiveness in the world: the one you practice because everything really is all right, and what went before is mended. The other kind of forgiveness you practice because someone needs desperately to be forgiven, or because you need just as badly to forgive them, for a heart can grab hold of old wounds and go sour as milk over them.

I want to skip this part. I want to pull on the arm of my slot machine and let the rolls flip over until they show a green tree in the summertime, and me away from that house, walking tall under a blue sky.

Oh, yes, when applied correctly mighty and noble battles result! Of course I always win—the value of Prince X is a constant. It cannot be lesser than that of Monster Y—this is the Moral Superiority Hypothesis made famous five hundred years ago by my ancestor Ethelred, the Mathematician-King. We have never seen his equal, in all these centuries.

12. Suffering of any kind is and shall be considered - contraband.

An alien, speaking of humans:) "Quite frankly, Mr. Rogers notwithstanding, you're a mess.

But you've just never had better coffee than the fair-trade organic late-harvest darkest of dark roasts at a Voorpret espresso bar. And you don't nuke that sort of thing from orbit. It's just so hard to find a good cappuccino when you're traveling.

Most folk have three faces - the face they get when they're children, the face they own when they're grown, and the face they've earned when they're old.

Byron kissed her gloved hand as they stepped lightly round one another. He could dance like rivers could run. No one had ever kissed her hand before. Emily felt like she was going to throw up and like she was flying all at once.

And the funny, impish magic of a wrap party is that everyone still has scraps of their characters hanging off them like Salome's veils, fluttering, fading, but not quite finished tangling the tongue and tripping the feet. You're not in Wonderland anymore, but you positively reek of rabbit.

The opposite of Calypso is apocalypse.

Oh, please, do try to explain it to them. We'll be here for ninety years, and at the end of it they'll be quite certain you've told them that Mohammed is a turtle with an excellent singing voice. May you have better luck than I!