Quotes from Catherynne M. Valente

You never feel so grown up as when you are eleven, and never so young and unsure as when you are forty. That

Shadow Physicks are fearfully complicated. A. Amblygonite has no idea.

How often I spoilt things when I was trying so hard to do well.

The kind of smile that has kept a froggy, dark sort of surprise in its back pocket, and won't spoil it too soon.

Try your breath on the bones of everything that has them, remember the best songs and figure out how to write them down so when somebody's blowing on your bones, the songs keep on.

Bran felt terribly sorry for his sisters, but it was hardly his fault that the world was so determined to make girls suffer a great deal more than boys. He hadn't built the world. It had nothing to do with him.

let us hold hands instead of let us hold kitchens. To say put our heads together and not put our parlors together. But it is not as simple as replacing words anymore. Ravan is gone. My hearth is broken.

No one is a cup for another to drink from.

Chicago at the time owned a lake the size of a sea, several advertising firms, at least six tribes of marauding criminals, healthy herds of sailors grazing free, the first Ferris wheel in all the world, and more wind than it could care for.

What price the Red Wind paid for Hawthorn's postage he never saw. One can only know the weight and heft of the prices one pays onself. The costs borne by others are their own, secret and deep and long.

She is my wife and I am her own and you were not invited. Leave us alone.

Ohio is historically a healthy place for science fiction writers

I've been thinking a lot about rules lately. About karma, I guess, even though most people just viciously abuse that word. They don't give one spangly fuck about the wheel of becoming and unbecoming.

He does everything a Marshal does but twice as hard, twice as dirty, and without the soft and cushioning arms of the government to wipe his tears. The

I've been thinking a lot about rules lately. About karma, I guess, even though most people just viciously abuse that word. They don't give one spangly fuck about the wheel of becoming and unbecoming. They just want to rub themselves raw against the idea that bad things only happen to bad people. Samsara is just something they name their cat.

On the other side of the jelly-glass docking hatch they could see, improbably, impossibly, a hyperactive red panda jumping up and down and waving his paws at them.

And that's how you begin to win over a child. People who share a secret share a heart.

When little ones say they want to go home, they almost never meant it. They mean they are tired of this particular game, and would like to start another." "Yes, please, I would like to start another." "That's not magic I have, love. You're in this story. You must get out on your own if you are to get out at all.

He'll never be good if he can't choose to be nasty. It's the choice that makes the good.

Today I shall be a wicked murderous tyrant and crush something nice under my heel.

I ate sugared plums with a fork of sparrow bones; the marrow left salt in the fruit and the strange, thick taste of a thing once alive in all that sugar. When I asked my father why I should taste these bones along with the sweetness of the candied plums, he told me very seriously that I must always remember that sugar was once alive.

A ring don't make a bride, that's all.

Rich girls aren't criminals, don't you know? They're just troubled, poor things.

But the longer I'm dead, the more I think the universe is a big blackboard with rules scrawled all over it in chalk and stardust and it's just that the damn thing is flipped over and turned away from us so we can't see anything but the erase, which death, hitting the floor.