Quotes from Catherynne M. Valente

Metamorphosis is the most profound of all acts.

Because I'm a cat. A big one, the Panther of Rough Storms, in fact. But still a cat. If there's a saucer of milk to spill, I'd rather spill it than let it lie. If my mistress grows absent-minded and leaves a ball of yarn about, I'll bat it between my paws, and unravel it. Because it's fun. Because it's what cats do best.

Squeeze your eyes closed, as tight as you can, and think of all your favorite autumns, crisp and perfect, all bound up together like a stack of cards. That is what it is like, the awful, wonderful brightness of Fairy colors. Try to smell the hard, pale wood sending up sharp, green smoke into the afternoon. To feel the mellow, golden sun on your skin, more gentle and cozier and more golden than even the light of your favorite reading nook at the close of the day.

I reminded myself: when a book lies unopened it might contain anything in the world, anything imaginable. It therefore, in that pregnant moment before opening, contains everything. Every possibility, both perfect and putrid. Surely such mysteries are the most enticing things You grant us in this mortal mere -- the fruit in the garden, too, was like this. Unknown, and therefore infinite. Eve and her mate swallowed eternity, every possible thing, and made the world between them.

Where there is a Key, there is yet hope.

It is such hard work to keep your heart hidden! And worse, by the time you find it easy, it will be harder still to show it. It is a terrible magic in this world to ask for exactly the thing you want. Not least because to know exactly the thing you want and look it in the eye is a long, long labor.

Why should he be spared?' 'Someone ought to be.' And it will not be me. I have survived, but I have not been spared.

It was on the to-do list, but you know to-do lists. They get longer and longer until you might as well just carve the last items on your tombstone. Do the dishes.

It's Latin, which is an excellent language for mischief-making, which is why governments are so fond of it.

You know, in Fairyland-Above they said that the underworld was full of devils and dragons. But it isn't so at all! Folk are just folk, wherever you go, and it's only a nasty sort of person who thinks a body's a devil just because they come from another country and have different notions. It's wild and quick and bold down here, but I like wild things and quick things and bold things, too.

I've a devil of a habit for being right.

But the thought arrived inside her like a train: Marya Morevna, all in black, here and now, was a point at which all the women she had been met—the Yaichkan and the Leningrader and the chyerti maiden; the girl who saw the birds, and the girl who never did—the woman she was and the woman she might have been and the woman she would always be, forever intersecting and colliding, a thousand birds falling from a thousand oaks, over and over.

Fierce was her needle, and she wore it like a sword.

Just you wait. Papa Koschei is coming, coming, coming, over the hills on his red horse and he's got bells on his boots and a ring in his poket and he knows your name, Marya Morevna.

There is no such thing as a people who are all wicked or even all good. Everyone chooses. But even they, even they looked at people and saw only tools. No one is a cup for another to drink from.

Still, she was not sorry. If the world is divided into seeing and not seeing, Marya thought, I shall always choose to see.

We are all dead. All equal. Broken and aimless and believing we are alive. This is Russia and it is 1952. What else would you call hell?

Stories,' the green-eyed Sigrid said, unperturbed, 'are like prayers. It does not matter when you begin, or when you end, only that you bend a knee and say the words.

September did not want to feel for the Marquess. That's how villains get you, she knew. You feel badly for them, and next thing you know, you're tied to train tracks. But her wild, untried heart opened up another bloom inside her, a dark branch heavy with fruit.

I burn, I freeze; I am never warm. I am rigid; I forgot softness because it did not serve me.

One of the awful secrets of seventeen is that it still has seven hiding inside it. Sometimes seven comes tumbling out, even when seventeen wants to be Grown-Up and proud. This is also one of the awful secrets of seventy.

There, weeping, a tsarevna lies locked in a cell. And Master Grey Wolf serves her very well. There, in her mortar, sweeping beneath the skies, the demon Baba Yaga flies. There Tsar Koschei, he wastes away, poring over his pale gold.

The world had gotten gritty enough. The only thing left to do in all that dirt was to shine.

You and I, being grown-up and having lost our hearts at least twice or thrice along the way, might shut our eyes and cry out: Not that way, child! But as we have said, September was Somewhat Heartless, and felt herself reasonably safe on that road. Children always do.