Quotes from Catherynne M. Valente

They were all very young, really, too young for all they had seen, but too old not to have seen it.

they leave when it's over, exeunt, pursued by a bear with an empty porridge bowl. If

No one cared who they'd been before, or even who they were now. Sometimes it felt like they lived at the bottom of the world. People at the bottom of the world mind their business, mostly.

She still longed for the best heights of magic, to see dragons and mermaids, to see the naked world.

If you let things start claiming to mean other things, there's no limit on how many things they can mean!

This was how it was done: you bare your belly to a great beast and endure trials and it all works itself out. There is a treasure or a sword. Or a woman. And that thing is yours not because you defeated anything, or because your flesh was hard and unyielding, but because you were worthy of it, worthy all along. The trials and the beast were just a way of telling the world you wanted it, and the world asking in her hard way, hard as bones and hollow mountains, if you really and truly did.

Luck is a finite and rare substance in the universe, like palladium or cobalt. To use it, you have to take it from somebody else.

And feeling someone else's feelings...' Never replied softly. 'It's still lonely, but it's so much bigger than lonely. It's not hitting five people or one with the trolley but flying it off the tracks into the stars and sparing them all.

For all that they love to make kings, John's folk seem to have little interest in the actual business of ruling anything. They like to become, they do not like to be.

Ancestors. Ghosts. Ghosts we're still married to even though we can't see so much as their shadows on the ground. We're no better than pieces on squares, in a game the past plays with the future.

Ivan said, If only we could eat violin music.

Thomas did not pay much attention to his lessons that day. It hardly mattered as Mrs. Wilkinson only seemed interested in how to make an "A" and what colour was magenta and how to add one and one together. Thomas knew all that. Only that morning he'd been reading a book full of big violent illustrations of the great battles of Britain, with quite a lot of magenta in it.

They hadn't the first thing to do with inventing wormholes; it was the same pure imbecilic drooling luck that so many of the bloody things opened up just outside Aluno Prime's gravitational sphere of influence that dealt Europe a royal flush of luxury high-speed horses, butter-dispensing cows, jumper-shedding sheep, bacon-distributing pigs, and nonunionized donkeys, and Australia a full hand of fuck all.

His parties have room for all. Come on in. Nobody to look at you funny in here. Nobody to tell you not to have that drink, kiss that fella, smash that chair, light that chandelier on fire. Do it all. Do it all forever.

Yes, life is the opposite of rare and precious. It's everywhere; it's wet and sticky; it has all the restraint of a toddler left too long at day care without a juice box. And life, in all its infinite and tender intergalactic variety, would have gravely disappointed poor gentle-eyed Enrico Fermi had he lived only a little longer, for it is deeply, profoundly, execrably stupid.

Sell your soul and half your shoes for a glass of gin.

She must have cried for some secret amphibian reason. Then her dress caught on fire while they danced, and there was a mess, but that's neither here nor there.

All little girls are terrible,' he admitted finally. 'but the Marquess, at least, has a very fine hat

The grass and the rivers and the stones and women and horses and more Stars and men and clouds and birds and trees came dancing through the afterbirth of the Mare,

Ragtime plinking, glasses clinking, choruses getting sung with only half the lyrics right, giggles bubbling over like a tower of champagne. It's a party, shaking down the dawn.

So I talk to the dead. They're the only ones who can see the whole story. All they've got is story.

And when funny things happen, you just have to go along, don't you? Because they might never happen again and you'll have missed the joke of it, missed the fun, and then when you're old and your kittens ask you what you did when the world had its glad rags on, you won't have nothing to say, will you?

We Queerfolk are big-picture types. You have to be, to see how the Queerness of the World works itself through everything.

He looked so sorry and miserable as he pushed me out the door. It stung. It always stings when there's this whole story going on and you're really just a B-plot walk-on who only got a look at three pages of the script.