Quotes from Catherynne M. Valente

No, answered Mo. Maybe we're getting sick. Grumpo had that cold, remember? He told us to snuggle up close so we would get it, too.

I sell Damascus steel, folded and intricate, dug up from the earth, practically useless, desirable only to lovers of the arcane, the beautiful, the old. No

There must be a way! I have begun a Quest! Quests do not simply end. You win or you lose; it is not just suddenly over.

Why…" Sophia raises her eyes to the ceiling, searching for a divinity that is not there, not for her. Her eyes fill up with hopelessness. She asks a question older than day and night. "Why doesn't He love me like He loves you?" Tears fall down her perfect face. "Why does He let you do this? Why won't He tell you to stop?

Talking to Zelda felt like talking to a radio. It talked back, but you couldn't call it a conversation.

The Marsh King raised himself up and ushered me out the door with the air of a host who has just realized he is one guest away from a comfortable nap.

I will always be here, in my old chair by the door, waiting for you, whenever you are lonesome. Our little house will always look just the same as when we first blew the dust off the bookshelves, and the kettle will always be just about to boil. Sometimes I will be young, and sometimes I will be old, and sometimes you will be young, and sometimes you will be old. But for as long as forever, I will keep a room for you. I swear by the sparkle in my eye and the spring in your step.

In his own country, Death can be kind. But of an end

I love you, and I am your wife, and I forgive you of all the sins of this world, all the sins we invented just to commit within our cave. I love you ... In a world without end. I love you.

St. Oscar says SCRAM to all that. Just be trash together and love as long as you can and then stop when you can't anymore and be trash separately.

It's not nihilism is there's really no point to anything.

Thing is, just because you make a body shiver don't make it yours.

I was meeting a mountain. I meant to kiss her in secret. I meant to wed her under the midnight dark. The prettiest mountain you ever saw, sparkling with snow in all the right places, rich with granite and tourmaline and silver, sturdy and sensible and weathered by experience of eons. When she saw me, my mountain's pine trees bristled and the wind in her heights whistled my name. When I saw her, I felt rivers break through the rock of my heart and carve me into a new shape.

Death stands behind every bride, every groom.

I am sorry," said the machine, slumping at the shoulders. "I will try to have the right answer, if you will come back later." I put my hand on the creature's shoulder. "It's all right; I don't know, either. But spiders are funny and determined things, and must be treated carefully." "Yes," she said. "It is the same with clocks".

If Eve went door to door with her apple, not a soul in the Artemisia wouldn't have grabbed it, planted a kiss on old Mama Fig Leaf, and had that shiny red temptation turned into the applejack of good and evil within an hour.

Somewhere in between discovering various heretofore cripplingly socially anxious particles and transuranic elements and digging through plutonium to find the treat at the bottom of the nuclear box, he found the time to consider what would come to be known as the Fermi Paradox.

They happen because Life consumes everything and Death never sleeps, and between them the world moves. Winter becomes spring. And every once in a while, they act out a strange, sad little pantomime, just to see if anyone has won yet.

We like the wrong sort of girls", they wrote. "They are usually the ones worth writing about.

But it is difficult for men to disbelieve a woman who insists that she wishes to serve them, and he nodded assent.

Patience is always the last ingredient in any spell, the last part in any machine, what ever your original blue prints say.

The hinterlands . Where the criminals and the carnivals and the concatenating counterfeiters of no morals to speak of make a home.

Do you understand Christ to be more like an ox (excuse us, three oxen) or more like a door?

Equally dead, equally bound. You will live as you live anywhere. With difficulty, and grief.