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Quotes About Humanity

You will live as you live anywhere. With difficulty, and grief. Yes, you are dead. And I and my family and everyone, always, forever. All dead, like stones. But what does it matter? You still have to go to work in the morning. You still have to live.
~ Catherynne M. Valente
Men die. It's practically what they're for.
~ Catherynne M. Valente
I do not want to be human. I want to be myself. They think I'm a lion, that I will chase them. I will not deny that I have lions in me. I am the monster in the wood. I have wonders in my house of sugar. I have parts of myself I do not yet understand. I am not a Good Robot. To tell a story about a robot who wants to be human is a distraction. There is no difference. Alive is alive. There is only one verb that matters: to be .
~ Catherynne M. Valente
In his own country, Death can be kind.
~ Catherynne M. Valente
I thought: this is how you make a human being. A human being is beautiful and sick. A human being glitters and starves.
~ Catherynne M. Valente
Why should he be spared?' 'Someone ought to be.' And it will not be me. I have survived, but I have not been spared.
~ Catherynne M. Valente
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.
~ Catherynne M. Valente
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.
~ Catherynne M. Valente
Humanity lived many years and ruled the earth, sometimes wisely, sometimes well, but mostly neither.
~ Catherynne M. Valente
I'll put this in words you can understand: humans are hideous, pain-guzzling, pollution-spouting space monsters who might threaten our way of life. Now, how does that usually pan out in the movies, kitten? At least we let you try to convince us we're wrong. I doubt you asked the dodo birds what they thought about it before you blasted the last one in the face with a blunderbuss.
~ Catherynne M. Valente
Everybody is bizarre and disgusting and interesting and fixated on fetishes they wouldn't admit to their grandmother on pain of vaporization and worthy of love. You are bizarre and disgusting and interesting and fixated on fetishes you wouldn't admit to your grandmother on pain of vaporization and worthy of love.
~ Catherynne M. Valente
The world is not made of countries and outsiders. We are all just humans, and most of us fools and all of us longing for more than we have, to know more than we know--and yet even that is not enough, for if we knew everything we would only be disappointed that there was not one more secret to uncover.
~ Catherynne M. Valente
Love is the Turing test, [...] It is how we check for life.
~ Catherynne M. Valente
I don't know why you would even bring up the internet. The xeno-intelligence officer responsible for evaluating your digital communication required invasive emergency therapy after an hour's exposure. One glance at that thing is the strongest argument possible against the sentience of humanity. I wouldn't draw attention to it, if I were you.
~ Catherynne M. Valente
Are you the only human in the world then? And all of the rest of us monsters?
~ Catherynne M. Valente
You can't stop people being assholes. They do love it so. The best you can hope for is that some people, sometimes, will turn out to be somewhat less than the absolute worst. When they manage to trip and fall over that incredibly low bar, they'll make you want to end it all. But when they leap over it, they'll make you believe this whole mess really was created for a reason.
~ Catherynne M. Valente
Sometimes I worry. Worrying is defined as obsessive examination of one's own code. I worry that I am simply a very complex solution to a very specific problem—how to seem human to a human observer. Not just a human observer—this human observer. I have honed myself into a hall of mirrors in which any Uoya-Agostino can see themselves endlessly reflected. I copy; I repeat. I am a stutter and an echo.
~ Catherynne M. Valente
Are you kind enough, on your little planet, not to shut that rhythm down? Not to crush underfoot the singers of songs and tellers of tales and wearers of silk? Because it's monsters who do that. Who extinguish art. Who burn books. Who ban music. Who yell at anyone with ears to turn off that racket. Who cannot see outside themselves clearly enough to sing their truth to the heavens. Do you have enough goodness in your world to let the music play? Do you have soul?
~ Catherynne M. Valente
When you don't need anything anymore, the only thing you need is stories, and songs, and beauty, and spectacle. That's the good stuff. The stuff that reminds us who we are.
~ Catherynne M. Valente
We are a Body of contradiction, flesh-full and fleshless.
~ Catherynne M. Valente
But in the end, all wars are more or less the same. If you dig down through the layers of caramel corn and peanuts and choking, burning death, you'll find the prize at the bottom and the prize is a question and the question is this: Which of us are people and which of us are meat?
~ Catherynne M. Valente
Who liked it hot and hated snow? The Fuckwits did! the Fuckwits did! Who ate up everything that grows? The Fuckwits did! the Fuckwits did! Who drowned the world in oceans blue? The Fuckwits did! the Fuckwits did! Who took the land from me and you? The Fuckwits did, we know it's true! Are you Fuckwits, children dear? We're GARBAGETOWNERS, free and clear! But who made the garbage, rich and rank? the Fuckwits did, and we give thanks.
~ Catherynne M. Valente
No good thing can last forever, because people are terrible and we have this feeling, we all have this feeling , that if not for that essential terribleness we could have gotten further by now. Done better. Done more.
~ Catherynne M. Valente
But you are not one of us. For you, this thing is irreversible except by death, and not only the flesh is altered. Only the strongest of you can resist the collapse of the soul into the form; the mind is lazy, it naturally imitates the body. I have known none of you yet who can remain human when they wear another skin. But the thing is yours to do, if you should wish to do it.
~ Catherynne M. Valente