Quotes from Catherynne M. Valente

I believe we have an utterly unique specimen on our hands: a child who listens.

This is what comes of having a heart, even a very small and young one. It causes no end of trouble, and that's the truth.

In the space of one heartbeat to another I loved you and I was lost to you

Life is beautiful and life is stupid. This is, in fact, widely regarded as a universal rule not less inviolable than the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Uncertainty Principle, and No Post on Sundays. As long as you keep that in mind, and never give more weight to one than the other, the history of the galaxy is a simple tune with lyrics flashed on-screen and a helpful, friendly bouncing disco ball of all-annihilating flames to help you follow along.

If you want to kill yourself, do not use us as your knife.

She is dead. Almost certainly dead. Nearly conclusively dead. She is, at the very least, not answering her telephone.

For though, as we have said, all children are heartless, this is not precisely true of teenagers. Teenage hearts are raw and new, fast and fierce, and they do not know their own strength. Neither do they know reason or restraint, and if you want to know the truth, a goodly number of grown-up hearts never learn it.

Just because it's imaginary doesn't mean it isn't real.

Truly, Autumn is my season," the scarlet beast chorted. "Spring and Summer and Winter all begin with such late letters! But Autumn and Fall, I have loved best, because they are best to love.

It's saying no. That's your first hint that something's alive. It says no. That's how you know a baby is starting to turn into a person. They run around saying no all day, throwing their aliveness at everything to see what it'll stick to. You can't say no if you don't have desires and opinions and wants of your own. You wouldn't even want to. No is the heart of thinking.

Temptation likes best those who think they have a natural immunity, for it may laugh all the harder when they succumb.

To touch a person...to sleep with a person...is to become a pioneer," she whispered then, "a frontiersman at the edge of their private world, the strange, incomprehensible world of their interior, filled with customs you could never imitate, a language which sounds like your own but is really totally foreign, knowable only to them.

Who told you you couldn't come back when you're grown? Was it the same person who told you grown-ups don't cry or blush or clap their hands when they're happy? Don't try to say otherwise, I've seen you fighting like a boxer to change your face so that it never shows anything. Whoever told you that's what growing up means is a villain , as true as a mustache. I am growing up, too, and look at me! I cry and I blush and I live in Fairyland always!

Funny how "question" contains the word "quest" inside it, as though any small question asked is a journey through briars.

Do you know, Masha, how revelation comes? Like death. So sudden, though you knew all along it must occur. A revelation is always the end of something. It might even be cause for grief.

The whole point of growing up is to get big enough to hold the world you want inside you. But it takes a long time, and you really must eat your vegetables, and most often you have to make the world you want out of yourself.

Death is not a checkmate…it is more like a carnival trick. You cannot win, no matter how you move your Queen.

Some girls have to go to college to discover what they are good at; some are born doing what they must without even truly knowing why. I felt a hole in my heart shaped like a dark door I needed to guard.

The man who knelt before her would have sprung from her needles, even down the ghostly flecks of silver in his hair. She had not known before that she wanted all these things, that she preferred dark hair and a slightly cruel expression, that she wishes for tallness, or that a man kneeling might thrill her.

A labyrinth, when it is big enough, is just the world.

The smell of loving is a difficult one to describe, but if you think of the times when someone has held you close and made you safe, you will remember how it smells just as well as I do.

She must protect herself. There would be no one to do it for her. A plan started to prick up its ears inside her, slowly, but getting stronger.

Just remember that the only question in a house is who is to rule. The rest is only dancing around that, trying not to look it in the eye.

It was at thirteen years old that Marya Morevna learned how to keep a secret, and that secrets are jealous things, permitting no fraternization.