Quotes from Catherynne M. Valente

The Rare Earth Hypothesis means well, but it's colossally, spectacularly, gloriously wrong. Life isn't difficult, it isn't picky, it isn't unique, and fate doesn't enter into the thing. Kick-starting the gas-guzzling subcompact go-cart of organic sentience is as easy as shoving it down a hill and watching the whole thing spontaneously explode. Life wants to happen.

The history of every place is the history of the people inside it and the people outside it. The history of every person is the history of the love they've known and the hate they've grown.

I think this is very strange --" "All things are strange which are worth knowing (...).

He would say it all, except for the wishing she was a boy part, without crying or wobbling. The girls would look at him with such powerful love and gratitude that he would turn into a different person, a better person, the perfect person. All he needed was that one look and he could live forever.

You have already heard the First General Fact: Life is beautiful and life is stupid. It goes on to add: You can only ever fix one of these at a time, and wouldn't it be nice if anyone could agree on which one is the bigger problem?

Olli punched in with the cymbal-whack of her typewriter by the alley-side window while a happy neon sign six stories down flashing Hobart and Sons' Fine Smokables got its purple light all tangled up in her eyelashes.

The beauty Snow White's got has nothing to do with him. She's scarred up and suspicious and shameless. Her pretty's not for him. It's like saying the moon's got a fine figure on her. Maybe true, but what good is that to a man? Snow

He meant to kill me...No, not kill me – make me forget. Forget everything. He said we'd live together in a house of pumpkin and gold – yes, once I couldn't remember why I'd come to Fairyland-Below, or recall Fairyland-Above, or even Omaha and Mother and Father and any reason not to live in Tain and feast every night! How could he? That's as bad as killing, to take away everything a person is.

The day of the worst thing in the world was long and hot and bright, packed so full of summer autumn seeped out through the stitches.

When I grew a little older, and had suitors, I demanded from them rings from the bottom of the sea, or a sword from the depths of the desert, or a golden bough and a thick golden fleece, too, before I allowed even one kiss.

The Glasshobs built it to keep an eye on the stars, who have a tendency to run off on adventures and forget about how much we down-below folks need to navigate and cast horoscopes and meet lovers on balconies.

He rested his hand on mine, once or twice. He kissed my brow, one time, in the late evening when the stars were full as moons, and I had brought him both a jug of wine and a treatise on transfiguration he had been asking for all over town, and I felt it on my head like a pain. But love is like that, it is hard and awful and, usually, it is not contagious.

Comparatively, our private blunders are insignificant. Just part of the general pattern of human awfulness. We map our little disasters onto a beautiful picture of a great one, so that there's continuity. So that there's balance. We fail because we always fail. It's not our fault. For evidence, see the paradise we lack.

My Daddy always said a lady's gotta sit still and hush her mouth except for please and thank you and you don't say. But it's not fair to do that to a girl. Talking is the most fun you can have. Clothes on, clothes off, it's everything in the world.

And really, really, when you put a fairy tale together with grime and despair and industrial angst you get the Gothic, and that's where we live, Percy.

The name sounded to her like yellow sunlight on brown, dry earth, and she took it the way some young persons take trinkets when a shopkeeper's back is turned, even though it was a boy's name.

I opened my fist. Maruchan had stolen lipstick for me. Revlon Super Lustrous 919: Red Ruin, worn almost all the way down to the nub by some dead woman's lips. After that, a lot of years went by but they weren't anything special.

It's a law, a law of the universe. Like gravity or stupidity or how a minor chord always sounds sad.

One misfortune may be chance; two might be divine punishment. Three is a plan.

but she does not know whom she wishes to catch, only that she wishes to catch someone, anyone, to be anchored, to be connected, to not be abandoned.

Just a kid with hair the color of raisins and eyes the color of grape jelly, living the life glasstastic in a four bedroom wine bottle on the east end of Plum Pudding...

Darling September! That is why anyone wants to rule. Oh, they would never admit it. But at the bottom of their hearts, anyone who longs for power longs to have everyone and everything they love safe and happy forever in one place, no matter the cost. It's only what happens to those they do not love that makes it all go wrong-headed and hard.

God sighed, for all physical processes are reversible in theory—but not in practice.

Girls laugh. Their hair giggles down their back.