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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. By Catherynne M Valente
Today I shall be a wicked murderous tyrant and crush something nice under my heel. By Catherynne M Valente
She sounds like someone who spends a lot of time in libraries, which are the best sorts of people. By Catherynne M Valente
September drank in the starry sky with a longing and a tugging and a sigh. All the way up, to that enormous crescent in the black. By Catherynne M Valente
I chose you," he said simply. "All of the fish of me turned toward you at once. By Catherynne M Valente
The worst thing in the world is having to go back to the dark you shook off. By Catherynne M Valente
It is harder, usually, to find a person who wants to walk the streets of me, to taste the teas of my country, to ... immigrate, you could say. By Catherynne M Valente
She is my wife and I am her own and you were not invited. Leave us alone. By Catherynne M Valente
Snow White swallows that like a sword. She lets the hammer click back into place. Everything in her that's not nailed down is shaking loose. By Catherynne M Valente
I'm lonely, whispered Doctor Callow. Don't be. There's a million worlds to play with. By Catherynne M Valente
Geography was fungible, fluid, unreliable. By Catherynne M Valente
The nearness of him crushed her, like being held by the sun. By Catherynne M Valente
This is my heart - carry it with you. I will dream of you in the dark, and you will taste it in my tea, and feel it in my shoes. By Catherynne M Valente
I got a heart like a half bottle of no-label whiskey.Nothing to brag on,but enough for you, and all your friends, too. By Catherynne M Valente
Over in the refrigerated section hang lies told so long ago and so often that they turned into the truth and get taught in history books. By Catherynne M Valente
Lebedeva snapped her fingers. "It's like lying!" she exclaimed. "Well, we understand that, of course! The bigger the lie, the happier the liar. By Catherynne M Valente
But love is love, and love is compulsion. I must, and I do. By Catherynne M Valente
I perceive that you have a cruel heart, my child. It lies within your breast like a smoldering blade, hissing steam at me. By Catherynne M Valente
But her heart was so cold that she could hold ice in her mouth and it would never melt. By Catherynne M Valente
Thing is, just because you make a body shiver don't make it yours. By Catherynne M Valente
It is not so easy to always remember who you are. By Catherynne M Valente
Things I Will Try to Say More Often: Why? I love you. I'm sorry. May I have chocolate? Yes. yes. yes. By Catherynne M Valente
Brother," he wept, "my heart is being cut in two. I cannot bear it.""Tscha!" said the Tsar of Birds. "Life is like that. By Catherynne M Valente
The Marsh King raised himself up and ushered me out the door with the air of a host who has just realized he is one guest away from a comfortable nap. By Catherynne M Valente
How I adore you, Marya. How well I chose. Scold me; deny me. Tell me you want what you want and damn me forever. But don't leave me. By Catherynne M Valente
Monsters almost always are culture's way of working out their fears and are thus inherently incredibly interesting and powerful. By Catherynne M Valente
You can be innocent again. It's not true, what they say, that you can never get it back. You can. It's only that most folk cannot be bothered. By Catherynne M Valente
And as we watched, the Tsar of Death lifted up his eyelids like skirts and began to dance in the streets of Leningrad. By Catherynne M Valente
Buck up, baby blowfish. Just puff up bigger than your sadness and scare it right off. That's the only way to live in the awful old ocean. By Catherynne M Valente
He missed youlike a fish in a bowlmisses the open sea. By Catherynne M Valente
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. By Catherynne M Valente
When you are this hungry, you cannot even remember who you used to be, she whispered. Who you might have been, if not for the hunger. By Catherynne M Valente
War is not for winning, Masha," sighed Koschei, reading the tracks of supply lines, of pincer strategies, over her shoulder. "It is for surviving. By Catherynne M Valente
Time is no one's friendtime has no social niceties and holds the door for nobody nowhere. But I hold the door for time, with my one good paw. By Catherynne M Valente
It's not so bad, my darling. Being dead. It's like being alive, only colder. By Catherynne M Valente
We were just holes, after all, holes filled up with light, and deep in our secret hearts we worried that we were an accident, By Catherynne M Valente
A girl in want of a Leopard still has feet. By Catherynne M Valente
Love me, and I will laugh for you, and if you can make me laugh, my laughter will, quite simply, ransom the whole of the world from death. By Catherynne M Valente
Just tell yourself a story that'll satisfy you and pretend he told it. By Catherynne M Valente
Why should I care about you first kiss,' he said. 'You can kiss anyone you like. But sometimes if you wanted to kiss me, that would be all right, too. By Catherynne M Valente
... That's what a map is, you know. Just a memory. Just a wish to go back home - someday, somehow. ... By Catherynne M Valente
Some small ones learn to stitch together a Coat of Scowls or a Scarf of Jokes to hide their Hearts. Some hammer up a Fort of Books to protect theirs. By Catherynne M Valente
In the beginning there was Dust, and in the end there will be Dust, and in the middle there is Dust, Dust, Dust! By Catherynne M Valente
There is no end and no beginning. There is only we two, alone in the dark, for always. By Catherynne M Valente
...the beginning is where the end gets born. By Catherynne M Valente
Everything is always happening all at once, in the present tense, forever, the beginning and the end and the denouement and the remaindering. By Catherynne M Valente
You are a Witch. I am a Prince. In all the books, where there is a Witch and a Prince there is a way. By Catherynne M Valente
You are going to break your promise. I understand. And I hold my hands over the ears of my heart, so that I will not hate you. By Catherynne M Valente
She felt as she often did in class when she was nearly sure she had the right answer, but could not always make herself raise her hand. By Catherynne M Valente
Have I ever done anything of my own, an act or state that arose from Elefsis, and not careful, exquisite mimicry?Have they? By Catherynne M Valente
Marya pinned out her childhood like a butterfly. She considered it the way a mathematician considers an equation. By Catherynne M Valente
Will Hilt to hand yet be restored? Take me up, thy mother's sword. By Catherynne M Valente
Be my friend and love me, for the world is terrible lonely and I am sad. By Catherynne M Valente
The Heart of Fairyland is a story," she said, and she felt so warm and light and full of rightness of it that she thought she might faint. By Catherynne M Valente
We all live inside the terrible engine of authority, and it grinds and shrieks and burns so that no one will say: lines on maps are silly. By Catherynne M Valente
She was ... unhappy. It was part of her, you could not separate her from it. She was sad the way a horse is strong or a bird flies. By Catherynne M Valente
Snow White gets a Social Security card. She gets a job building houses out in California. Picks oranges. By Catherynne M Valente
What happens to the West happens to Snow White, which is to say they both turn into jokes. By Catherynne M Valente
How long your hair has grown. You could strangle a man in it. By Catherynne M Valente
That is what happens when a person lives alone for so long - no one else can change their ways. By Catherynne M Valente
I know real dirt looks nothing like this. Nothing like soft blood flecked with black bone. By Catherynne M Valente
That a clever person is never bored, and a bored person is never clever. By Catherynne M Valente
She could be quite brave in the presence of a Wyverary, but tall and lovely ladies made her shy, even if they were made of soap. By Catherynne M Valente
All things are strange which are worth knowing. By Catherynne M Valente
This is how you learn to see: You put together a crew. No one can see a damn thing clearly with only two eyes. By Catherynne M Valente
She did not want Fairyland to be full of older girls who wanted to be stars. By Catherynne M Valente
But soon the wine sack was empty, and sleep brushed my ears with her ash-lips. By Catherynne M Valente
You can tell all that about me from your measuring tape?''Well, I use the metric system, It's the only way to get really exact numbers. By Catherynne M Valente
Zelda was winter's best dame: pale and dark with a shimmer of Christmas in her eye, a flash of New Year's in her laugh. By Catherynne M Valente
Death is not a checkmate ... it is more like a carnival trick. You cannot win, no matter how you move your Queen. By Catherynne M Valente
So my name is Scout. Yeah, my mom read To Kill a Mockingbird. Leave it to her to think 5th grade required reading is totally deep. By Catherynne M Valente
When you've lost your girl, it doesn't much matter where you live. Everywhere is just The Place She Isn't, and that's the front and back of it. By Catherynne M Valente
No, love, in real life you can get all the way to death and never have finished one single story. By Catherynne M Valente
Anyway, nobody bothers with real beginnings anymore. We stopped making up stories about the creation of the world ages ago. By Catherynne M Valente
I still want to kiss you. To feel the life in you seize on the life in me. Raw and fresh and new. By Catherynne M Valente
I have to know, I have to or else you will just rule me until the end of everything because you know and I do not. By Catherynne M Valente
After so long keeping to herself and tending her secret quietly, all these words just bubbled up out of her her like cool golden champagne. By Catherynne M Valente
One is always homesick for places where one came to grief. By 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. By Catherynne M Valente
Now, in the Kingdom of School, to be asked into another child's room is like being asked inside their heart. By Catherynne M Valente
In my mind I know the name of an ocean the size of everything that was. My mouth can only call it death. By Catherynne M Valente
Dreams keep the heart alive. By Catherynne M Valente
If she was in a teaching mood she wasn't in a hitting mood. Like sneezing and keeping your eyes open, Mrs. H couldn't do both at once. By Catherynne M Valente
A dragon looks like a girl when it is young. By Catherynne M Valente
But luck can be spent, like money; and lost, like a memory; and wasted, like a life. If By Catherynne M Valente
Temperament, you'll find, is highly dependent on time of day, weather, frequency of naps, and whether one has had enough to eat. By Catherynne M Valente
You know how we can be about things which sparkle and shine. We imagine they will put back something of what has been lost. By Catherynne M Valente
It calmed him to collect the things he knew and did not speak of. By Catherynne M Valente
There must be a way! I have begun a Quest! Quests do not simply end. You win or you lose; it is not just suddenly over. By Catherynne M Valente
Perhaps my philosophy is not so sophisticated. It goes: Come inside. I love you. A Whelk's love will grow as big as it's allowed. By Catherynne M Valente
I believe we have an utterly unique specimen on our hands: a child who listens. By Catherynne M Valente
The kind of smile that has kept a froggy, dark sort of surprise in its back pocket, and won't spoil it too soon. By Catherynne M Valente
A basic moral imperative is in play here. If you can protect a child, you must. By Catherynne M Valente
They climbed their ladders to wheedle and prune the trees into holiness By Catherynne M Valente
It is important to announce your intentions at top volume, she thought, or your intentions will think you are ashamed of them. By Catherynne M Valente
I readied myself for the great effort of speaking with the throat-and-belly instead of the mind-and-heart. It is altogether a different skill. By Catherynne M Valente
Being on time is a filthy habit practised only by roosters and retirees. By Catherynne M Valente
In both marriage and war you must cut up the things people say like a cake and eat only what you can stomach. By Catherynne M Valente
It's Latin, which is an excellent language for mischief-making, which is why governments are so fond of it. By Catherynne M Valente
The storm ate up September's cry of despair, delighted at its mischief, as all storms are. By Catherynne M Valente
But you like him already, I can tell. Even though we showed our teeth and were very clear about his being wicked. By Catherynne M Valente
What mirrors we are, set to face each other, reflecting desire. By Catherynne M Valente
Sweet as cherries, bright as berries, light of my moony sky. By Catherynne M Valente
A thing too familiar becomes invisible. By Catherynne M Valente
Fairyland is a very Scientifick place. We subscribe to all the best journals. By Catherynne M Valente
The Heart of Fairyland is a story By Catherynne M Valente
I have not been in Fairyland nearly long enough to start crying, September thought, then bit her tongue savagely. By Catherynne M Valente
A child equals the mass of Fairyland times the speed of luck squared. By Catherynne M Valente
Be nice to Fairyland. She is old and tender of heart and when her feelings are hurt, she cries volcanoes. By Catherynne M Valente
Life is like that. Death sweeps it away. That's what death is for. That's why they keep telling this story. It's the only story. By Catherynne M Valente
Truly, Mallow yearned to know everything. Curiosity was part of her, like her short blond hair and bitten fingernails. By Catherynne M Valente
He didn't even know how to talk about it. He had practiced not talking about the things he knew until no man could be called his equal. By Catherynne M Valente
Some switches must be flipped, and some children cannot help turning off to on and on to off, just to see what will happen. By Catherynne M Valente
But something older and wiser within her said, Some things are for hiding and for keeping. By Catherynne M Valente
And honey, everybody eats art and drinks stories. It's the best drunk there is! By Catherynne M Valente
Love rarely waits for permission. By Catherynne M Valente
There is no such thing as a good wife or a good husband. Only ones who bide their time. By Catherynne M Valente
Temptation likes best those who think they have a natural immunity, for it may laugh all the harder when they succumb. By Catherynne M Valente
It is unutterably boring, the multitudes in progression from innocence to inkling to knowledge to the inevitable apotheosis of desperation. By Catherynne M Valente
It tasted like a shade of white near blue; it tasted like the idea of pearls; it tasted like a memory nearly grasped but lost at the last moment. By Catherynne M Valente
If you have ever seen a falling star, you have seen a Changeling arriving. By Catherynne M Valente
But it is difficult for men to disbelieve a woman who insists that she wishes to serve them, and he nodded assent. By Catherynne M Valente
How wonderful is ritual, what comfort in dark times! By Catherynne M Valente
And indeed, as night drew on the sky like a bodice, lacing it with the last beams of sunlight, By Catherynne M Valente
You have to have the right sort of stone. Peridot for mothers, girasol for lovers, sapphire for sadness, and garnet for joy. By Catherynne M Valente
All jobs are odd, or they would be games or naps or picnics. By Catherynne M Valente
Being stern was like being underwater-she could do it, but never for long, and how her whole boy burned to come up for breath! By Catherynne M Valente
Funny how "question" contains the word "quest" inside it, as though any small question asked is a journey through briars. By Catherynne M Valente
And hell, sometimes the best thing is to put on a black dress and become a wicked stepmother. There's power in that, if you're after power. By Catherynne M Valente
I suppose if you have ten children one of them might go into government, which is the same as losing a child really. By Catherynne M Valente
We Queerfolk are big-picture types. You have to be, to see how the Queerness of the World works itself through everything. By Catherynne M Valente
Still, she was not sorry. If the world is divided into seeing and not seeing, Marya thought, I shall always choose to see. By Catherynne M Valente
Don't worry," Marya whispered, kissing his forehead. "My old bones will follow yours soon enough. By Catherynne M Valente
The future is a messy, motley business, little girl. By Catherynne M Valente
There is no better teacher of rough necessity than bad luck, and you will have great use of me, I promise. By Catherynne M Valente
Tell it fast before you get scared and silence yourself. You'll never wish you'd held back a little more. By Catherynne M Valente
It was at thirteen years old that Marya Morevna learned how to keep a secret, and that secrets are jealous things, permitting no fraternization. By Catherynne M Valente
Being Necessary is food no less than cabbages and strawberry pies. By Catherynne M Valente
It's a secret and if you tell a secret the secret comes alive and can never be kept safe at home again. By Catherynne M Valente
We who were once living can guard you still, and love you, and keep you living safe and whole. Nothing ever truly dies. By Catherynne M Valente
Everybody's strange everywhere. Most of the trick of being a social animal is pretending you're not. But who do you fool? Nobody worth talking to. By Catherynne M Valente
if enough lost things band together, even in the darkest depths, they aren't really lost at all anymore. By Catherynne M Valente
Patience is always the last ingredient in any spell, the last part in any machine, what ever your original blue prints say. By Catherynne M Valente
The Sirens flicked their wings at the wall, inscribing it with their own blue ink: Even in penance is beauty; blessed are all the ocean's drowned! By Catherynne M Valente
I expect everyone in Boston has something like that ring, which is why I am glad I have never been to Boston. By Catherynne M Valente
Remember this when you are queen," he whispered hoarsely. "I moved the earth and the water for you. By Catherynne M Valente
She long ago learned that if she waited and blinked and behaved like a pupil, eventually someone would lecture her on something. By Catherynne M Valente
It's not a game if you don't cheat, it's just two sods making a mess with fifty-two pieces of paper. By Catherynne M Valente
I looked at this man and thought: Oh, how we are going to hurt each other. By Catherynne M Valente
The best way to be the kind of girl you want to be is to do what that girl would do. By Catherynne M Valente
Remember, pain is not a test. Knowledge is not enough. By 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. By Catherynne M Valente
She drank like a Czar and sang like a broken squeezebox and danced like the Sugarplum Fairy cutting loose at last By Catherynne M Valente
Bad luck relies on absolutely perfect timing. By Catherynne M Valente
Bad luck relies absolutely on perfect timing By Catherynne M Valente
A prophetic world that can never come true. By Catherynne M Valente
Your past's a private matter, sweetheart. You just keep it locked up in xbox where it can't hurt anyone. By Catherynne M Valente
You ain't no woodstove; you can't just squat in the middle of my house and stew. By Catherynne M Valente
Close up your head; your brain is getting loose. By Catherynne M Valente
No, not like this, when I have not seen you without your skin on, when I know nothing, when I am not safe. Not you, whose name all my nightmares know. By Catherynne M Valente
Omaha is no place for anybody. By Catherynne M Valente
They were all very young, really, too young for all they had seen, but too old not to have seen it. By Catherynne M Valente
It is well known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else. By Catherynne M Valente
Love is the Turing test, [ ... ] It is how we check for life. By Catherynne M Valente
In his own country, Death can be kind. But of an end By Catherynne M Valente
Family is a transitive property. By Catherynne M Valente
I have tried to be a generous narrator and care for my girl as best I can. I cannot help that readers will always insist on adventures ... By Catherynne M Valente
The day of the worst thing in the world was long and hot and bright, packed so full of summer autumn seeped out through the stitches. By Catherynne M Valente
Tamburlaine's house seemed more a place where books kept their people than where people kept their books. By Catherynne M Valente
She had a highly developed sense of humor which in some lights looked a bit like a sense of justice. By Catherynne M Valente
Where there's a labyrinth, there's a minotaur, and vice versa! I can't imagine a decent maze that would be caught dead without a minotaur. By Catherynne M Valente
Check your pockets, my chimney-child. By Catherynne M Valente
I hope, in years to come, I shall hold my heart up and it will be a pane of clear glass, through which I see all, but nothing is distorted. By Catherynne M Valente
I will see him with his skin off before I agree to fall in love. By Catherynne M Valente
Every person draws a map that shows themselves at the center. But that does not mean that no other countries exist. By Catherynne M Valente
Sell your soul and half your shoes for a glass of gin. By Catherynne M Valente
Anything is a poem if you say it often enough. By Catherynne M Valente
How poor you are, September. You make my heart groan. I know about Homesickness. It begins with H. What will you do? By Catherynne M Valente
So much light, sweet girl, begins in the dark. By Catherynne M Valente
She's an old woman possessed of great powersbut aren't all old women possessed of great powers? Occupational hazard, I think. By Catherynne M Valente
What maiden knows how the world is skewed to spare any testing of her virtue? By Catherynne M Valente
It's a law, a law of the universe. Like gravity or stupidity or how a minor chord always sounds sad. By Catherynne M Valente
It's Survival of Them Who's Best at Nicking Things, girl! By Catherynne M Valente
Cocky don't say anything and that's as good as love right about now. By Catherynne M Valente
It's not nihilism is there's really no point to anything. By Catherynne M Valente
Everything looks like magic when you don't understand it. By Catherynne M Valente
When the world changes, it stashes us away where we can't make it run the other way again. By Catherynne M Valente
Remember this when you are queen," she breathed. "I told you my secrets. By Catherynne M Valente
Magic has a logic, like algebra. Once you get to know it, it's easy. If this, then that. You write with a pencil, you don't make frog soup with it. By Catherynne M Valente
Punishment doesn't mean you aren't loved. On the contrary. You can only punish someone you love. By Catherynne M Valente
You can never know how your clock runs. But it does run - and always faster than you think. By Catherynne M Valente
they leave when it's over, exeunt, pursued by a bear with an empty porridge bowl. If By Catherynne M Valente
I look at you, Masha, and it is like drinking cold water. I look at you and it is like my throat being cut. By Catherynne M Valente
You will always fall in love, and it will always be like having your throat cut, just that fast. By Catherynne M Valente
But a person's smell and their alarms and borrowed shirts and secret words linger for a long time.Much longer than a house. By Catherynne M Valente
Any story told is a lie cunningly told to hide the real world from the poor bastards who live in it. By Catherynne M Valente
I'm gonna be good at something other than marrying, darlings. Besides, I don't want them. I don't even wanna screw them, how am I gonna marry them? By Catherynne M Valente
A library is never complete. That's the joy of it. We are always seeking one more book to add to our collection. By Catherynne M Valente
The Land of Parents is strange and full of peril. By Catherynne M Valente
I do not want to muddle about with Politicks, and whenever two Folk of any sort are in a room together there are always Politicks to be muddled in. By Catherynne M Valente
Some who deserve failure do not achieve it," he sniffed. "Some who deserve nothing are given the world. By Catherynne M Valente
I could not say what creeps and whispers through the branches and down the threaded Road, but I hear it, and I am not afraid. By Catherynne M Valente
She was a vengeful goddess and her will was absolute. By Catherynne M Valente
That's the only way to look at things, I always say," propounded the Duke. "Slantways, sideways, and upside down. By Catherynne M Valente
Remember this when you are queen," said the vintovnik solemnly. "That I went into the dark for, and scared an old woman half to death. By Catherynne M Valente
No matter what you write, you actually can't help retelling a fairy tale somewhere along the way. By Catherynne M Valente
These words were small and they only meant what they said, not how they felt before he said them. He nearly wept with the frustration of it. By Catherynne M Valente
So you don't love him. Why would you look forlove with a man? How could a man ever understand you? By Catherynne M Valente
Magic does that. It wastes you away. Once it grips you by the ear, the real world gets quieter and quieter, until you can hardly hear it at all. By Catherynne M Valente
Death hath no dominion. By Catherynne M Valente
Vampires should be pretty much like mean girls, all the time, only amazing at it. Flawless. They've had time. By Catherynne M Valente
Things that are unsightly: birthmarks, infidelity, strangers in one's kitchen. Too much sunlight. Stitches. Missing teeth. Overlong guests. By Catherynne M Valente
Respect me. Be proud, and if you love me, a little afraid, because love so often looks like fear. We are alike. We are alike. By Catherynne M Valente
I opened my door and everything they had for me was tainted because the land of Used-to-Be is just full of ghosts starving for your breath. By Catherynne M Valente
You're not in love if you keep your own heart bricked up behind your bones. You're only playing. By Catherynne M Valente
People are clocks who think they wind themselves. By Catherynne M Valente
I did not see the appeal of a wife. We had never had one before. She would not be half as interesting as our buffalo. By Catherynne M Valente
But if you must be clever, then be clever. Be brave. Sleep with fists closed and shoot straight. By Catherynne M Valente
Storytelling can save you. Both the telling and the listening. By Catherynne M Valente
Do you know what a thirteen-year-old girl can do when she is alone and frightened and believes she is right? By Catherynne M Valente
He tried to reconstruct the story in his mind, but it kept getting confused, bleeding into itself like watercolors. By Catherynne M Valente
But cheating has always been the purview of fairies, and as we are about to enter their domain, we ought to act in accordance with local customs. By Catherynne M Valente
But I've brought you to the snow, and the snow is the beginning and the end of everything, everyone knows that. I By 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 By Catherynne M Valente
However unlikely it may seem, it is the truth and, therefore, one hundred percent likely. By Catherynne M Valente
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 By Catherynne M Valente
They want only their private toys and candies, and will not share. By Catherynne M Valente
She wasn't angry. You can't get angry just because the world's so much bigger than you and you're stuck in it. By Catherynne M Valente
A labyrinth, when it is big enough, is just the world. By Catherynne M Valente
Of late, she had felt coldness in herself, and though she feared it, she loved it too, for it made her strong. By Catherynne M Valente
You took on a Quest, which is a thing only men - and exceedingly stupid men, usually - do. By Catherynne M Valente
Can you imagine what it would do to a person, to know that they were standing between three people and that marrow-deep, desperate need? By Catherynne M Valente
But we had young turnips and mustard greens in our befuddled stomach that day, and these things make bravery. By Catherynne M Valente
Well, very splendid and very frightening. But splendid things are often frightening. Sometimes, it's the fright that makes them splendid at all. By Catherynne M Valente
All hands drowned, except the Red Hound of Mykenos, who bit the sea until it spit him back. Old By Catherynne M Valente
Fierce was her needle, and she wore it like a sword. By Catherynne M Valente
Still life is boring. Never stand still! Jumping bean life! By Catherynne M Valente
I have all the books I could need, and what more could I need than books? By Catherynne M Valente
You can't kiss a girl into anything. By Catherynne M Valente
Oh, quit that. Blushing is for virgins and Christians. By Catherynne M Valente
Don't you ever feel like you're just a story someone is telling about someone like you? By Catherynne M Valente
I thought that for a long while, but you chose me, and then you chose him, and choosing is hard - one choice is never the end of the story. By Catherynne M Valente
September had no natural defense against lost things, being one herself. By Catherynne M Valente
There is only this world, as it is now, and there has never been another, can never be any other. By Catherynne M Valente
We've made too many movies, you and I. Or too few. Always too few. Too many to have any meaning, too few to say what we meant. By Catherynne M Valente
I was happy, the sun was high. I had enough. By Catherynne M Valente
That's how it goes - as soon as there's anything interesting in Ancient Greece, some arsehole with a magic hat comes along to murder it. By Catherynne M Valente
Her heart ached as though a knife had quietly slipped between her ribs. By Catherynne M Valente
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? By Catherynne M Valente
We all just keep moving, September. We keep moving until we stop. By Catherynne M Valente
A Sibyl is a door shaped like a girl. By Catherynne M Valente
It is best in the end to let women see to their own vengeance. By Catherynne M Valente
She is so stubborn, her heart has an argument with her head every time it wants to beat. By Catherynne M Valente
I've always had enough, even if my enough and your enough are as different as an elephant and a minaret. By Catherynne M Valente
All things built with tax money are beautiful: so we must think or go mad. By Catherynne M Valente
We are a Body of contradiction, flesh-full and fleshless. By Catherynne M Valente
Didn't you know? All stepmothers are witches. It is our compensation for remaining forever an intruder in another woman's house. By Catherynne M Valente
A tale may have exactly three beginnings: one for the audience, one for the artist, and one for the poor bastard who has to live in it. By Catherynne M Valente
Never put your faith in a Prince. When you require a miracle, trust in a Witch. By Catherynne M Valente
I am not a little girl anymore, dazzled by your magic. It is my magic, now, too. By Catherynne M Valente
There are many sorts of lies. You could fill a shop with them. To be sure, lies are terribly common. By Catherynne M Valente
I am the Walker and the Maze. By Catherynne M Valente
Humanity lived many years and ruled the earth, sometimes wisely, sometimes well, but mostly neither. By Catherynne M Valente
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. By Catherynne M Valente
Perhaps all a Tsaritsa is is a beautiful cold girl in the snow, looking down at someone wretched, and not yielding. By Catherynne M Valente
You humans, you know, whoever built you sewed irony into your sinews. By Catherynne M Valente
Don't worry, my little lump of rock. Everybody gets a chance to choose. Or else where would irony come from? By Catherynne M Valente
Memory is like that. It alters itself so that girlsare always trapped under the earth, waiting in the dark. By Catherynne M Valente
Readers will always insist on adventures, and though you can have grief without adventures, you cannot have adventures without grief. By Catherynne M Valente
Wife sounded like something exciting, something daring, something a bit scoundrelly, like pirate or bandit. And they were bandits, of course. By Catherynne M Valente
War must always be done out of sight, it shocks people and they stop immediately. By Catherynne M Valente
Opium ain't got nothing on the promise of tomorrow turning up better than today. Snow By Catherynne M Valente
It is good that you ruined your face, because it brought you to me, but also because beautiful women rarely work strong magic. By Catherynne M Valente
God is a random event, a nexus of pain and pleasure and making and breaking. By Catherynne M Valente
You'll forgive the flowery talk, won't you? Our family does so love to be told they are beautiful. Vanity is an old and venerable habit. By Catherynne M Valente
Where there is a Key, there is yet hope. By Catherynne M Valente
A good, solid, beefy lie is too heavy to stand on its own. It needs smaller, quicker, more complicated lies to hold it up. By Catherynne M Valente
Death stands behind every bride, every groom. By Catherynne M Valente
It's in our blood - we heard their distresses like a rung bell in our bones. By Catherynne M Valente
Histories are instruments of oppression. By Catherynne M Valente
But lost children always find each other, in the dark, in the cold. It is as though they are magnetized, and can only attract their like. By Catherynne M Valente
Music has more rules than math or magic and it's twice as dangerous as both or either. By Catherynne M Valente
Most people don't like complexity. They would prefer the world to be simple. By Catherynne M Valente
Trouble is, most times, when you go looking to sell your soul, nobody's buying. By Catherynne M Valente
She was determined that I hold this thing inside me like a heart - something irremovable and constant. By Catherynne M Valente
No one belongs when they are new to this world. All children are Changelings. By Catherynne M Valente
The burnt-off connectors and shadows where Ravan once filled my spaces - those, I think, are the sensations of grief. By Catherynne M Valente
Iago shrugged his furry shoulders. As you like. Saves me the work of picking the lock with my incisor. By Catherynne M Valente
Her cry is a hook and it catches me in the throat. By Catherynne M Valente
For a witch is nothing without her Spoon. By Catherynne M Valente
We must not dwell on what we were in our salad days when soup days steam now upon the table! By Catherynne M Valente
All Librarians are Secret Masters of Severe Magic. Goes with the territory. By Catherynne M Valente
Men die. It's practically what they're for. By Catherynne M Valente
I've a devil of a habit for being right. By Catherynne M Valente
Al kept it coming and nobody asked how and his only rule was: share. Be warm, be innocent, open your everything, speak easy. Share By Catherynne M Valente
I wish you the best that can be hoped for, and no worse than can be expected. By Catherynne M Valente
Every morning is a battle between the superego and the id, and I am a mere foot soldier with mud and a snooze button on her shield. By Catherynne M Valente
What happens to anything beautiful? Viy ate it up. By Catherynne M Valente
She knew herself, how she had slowly, over years, become a cat, a wolf, a snake, anything but a girl. How she had wrung out her girlhood like death. By Catherynne M Valente
She's an Italian flag in occupied territory, and I fall for her like Paris. By Catherynne M Valente
We like the wrong sorts of girls, they wrote. They are usually the ones worth writing about. By Catherynne M Valente
I savor bitterness - it is born of experience. It is the privilege of one who has truly lived. By Catherynne M Valente
In a city by the sea that was certainly never called anything so bourgeois as St. Petersburg, there stood a long, thin house on a long, thin street. By Catherynne M Valente
I think I look a little like a pumpkin," whispered September, secretly delighted. "I'm all green and orange. By Catherynne M Valente
Hats have power. Hats can change you into someone else. By Catherynne M Valente
Shadow Physicks are fearfully complicated. A. Amblygonite has no idea. By Catherynne M Valente
There are no tigers for us, just a city, waiting, and it loves us, in whatever ways a city can love. By Catherynne M Valente
But even the wisest of men may die, and that is especially true when the wisest of men has a fondness for industrial chemicals. By Catherynne M Valente
Clothes are a story you choose to tell about yourself, a different one every day. By Catherynne M Valente
The ghosts will eat everything because the bellies of ghosts want the whole world, just to fill one tiny corner. By Catherynne M Valente
Mug your destiny in an alley and punch it until it gives you what you want"pg 240 By Catherynne M Valente
A map shows maybes. By Catherynne M Valente
You can't trust just any old person who comes along with a hundred puffins and a pretty face! By Catherynne M Valente
A book is a door, you know. Always and forever. A book is a door into another place and another heart and another world. By Catherynne M Valente
I am selfish. I am cruel. My mate cannot be less than I. By Catherynne M Valente
She is dead. Almost certainly dead. Nearly conclusively dead. She is, at the very least, not answering her telephone. By Catherynne M Valente
Fantasy is my heart and love. And I just want to play in that garden for the rest of my life. By Catherynne M Valente
Girls laugh. Their hair giggles down their back. By Catherynne M Valente
You will live as you live in any world ... With difficulty, and grief. By Catherynne M Valente
We hold demonstrations and civil wars when inequities are discovered. By Catherynne M Valente
The war is always going badly. By Catherynne M Valente
The hinterlands. Where the criminals and the carnivals and the concatenating counterfeiters of no morals to speak of make a home. By Catherynne M Valente
What is the world but a boxing ring where fools and devils put up their fists? By Catherynne M Valente
In his own country, Death can be kind. By Catherynne M Valente
You know how questing goes. You can't explain it to anyone else; it would be like telling them your dreams. By Catherynne M Valente
That's what happens to friends, eventually. They leave you. It's practically what they're for. By Catherynne M Valente
I will keep it safe for you, Saturday whispered, barely brave enough to say it. By Catherynne M Valente
I have to do it myself. That's what a Queen does. She saves herself. By Catherynne M Valente
What was a person, if not the things they knew and the face they wore? By Catherynne M Valente
. . .building is medicine for free. By Catherynne M Valente
Draw the world the way you want it. Draw it and it will be. By Catherynne M Valente
It is in the nature of winds to Snatch and Grasp at things, and Blow Them Away. By Catherynne M Valente
They were all whispers now, the two of them, conspirators and thieves. By Catherynne M Valente
Forests have secrets,' he said gently. 'It's practically what they're for. To hide things. To separate one world from another. By Catherynne M Valente
Never trust anyone under one hundred! By Catherynne M Valente
They snickered behind her back in tones that sent up prickly hedges all around their tight huddles of lace dresses and ribboned curls. By Catherynne M Valente
Everything living has a mouth. Mouths bite and swallow; they talk; they taste. They kiss. A mouth is the main tool for living. By Catherynne M Valente
She said you'd come and I swore to eat your heart. By Catherynne M Valente
Honesty is such a nasty habit, dear. Like biting your nails. By Catherynne M Valente
In my experience, folk find it nigh on impossible to call a thing what it is. It By Catherynne M Valente
Oh, aren't you just the rottenest wet blanket whoever spoiled a sport. By Catherynne M Valente
That is the trouble with standing up to people, of course. Once you start doing it, you can hardly stop. By Catherynne M Valente
You're grown--crooked and backbent, but grown--and it's time to stop hanging your heart on your mother. By Catherynne M Valente
He ran like if he kept running he could escape the last thousand years. By Catherynne M Valente
Metamorphosis is the most profound of all acts. By Catherynne M Valente
We are halves, but we make an infinite whole. By Catherynne M Valente
In the space of one heartbeat to another I loved you and I was lost to you By Catherynne M Valente
No one is now what they were before the war. There's just no getting any of it back. By Catherynne M Valente
She was beautiful and terrifying, savage and pure. By Catherynne M Valente
An equation is a prophecy that always comes true. By Catherynne M Valente
A body can only deliver up the truth its bones know, Its blood, which is its history. By Catherynne M Valente
Your privilege is comprised of the questions you've never had to ask. By Catherynne M Valente
For grace may only be found briefly, and always in the midst of madness. By Catherynne M Valente
That's your first hint that something's alive. It says no. By Catherynne M Valente
I am sustained by Being Necessary. By Catherynne M Valente
Whenever one does extraordinary things, someone is bound to try to repeat them for themselves. It's the way of the world. By Catherynne M Valente
So I talk to the dead. They're the only ones who can see the whole story. All they've got is story. By Catherynne M Valente
He had not guessed how much of the body of a Quest was simply walking. By Catherynne M Valente
Did everything that had magic have teeth? By Catherynne M Valente
The great blessing and great cruelty of youth is that there seems to be time enough. By Catherynne M Valente
If you want to kill yourself, do not use us as your knife. By Catherynne M Valente
Do not ruin today with mourning tomorrow. By Catherynne M Valente
Things which are gone in the morning: sleep, darkness, grief, the moon. Women. Dreams. By Catherynne M Valente
She'd thought she left feeling helpless behind long ago - only we never leave helpless behind. It is a country in which we all hold passports. By Catherynne M Valente
All tamed things are made a bit ridiculous in the process, you know. By Catherynne M Valente
Autumn has a hungry heart - September is the beginning of death. By Catherynne M Valente
The body does the living; the shadow does the dreaming. By Catherynne M Valente
Love is what grown folk do to each other because the law frowns on killing. I By Catherynne M Valente
Rules are for those who can't think of a better way. By Catherynne M Valente
You should always listen to minotaurs. Anybody with four stomachs has to have a firm grip on reality. By Catherynne M Valente
A ring don't make a bride, that's all. By Catherynne M Valente
Everyone Is Looking for a Book Strong Enough to Change Them. By Catherynne M Valente
Breaking things heals a great many hurts. This is why children do it so often. By Catherynne M Valente
Everything good in the world has feathers and wings and claws. By Catherynne M Valente
A Bank is but a college of Fiscal Magic. By Catherynne M Valente
You look like a winter night", he had told her when he had given it to her. "I could sleep inside the cold of you". By Catherynne M Valente
I burn, I freeze; I am never warm. I am rigid; I forgot softness because it did not serve me. By Catherynne M Valente
Narrators may go where they please. By Catherynne M Valente
Everyone has their invisible cloak of all things past. By Catherynne M Valente
If there are spells, they have a right to weave. By Catherynne M Valente
After love, no one is what they were before. By Catherynne M Valente
It's a dreadful world with only your own heart to drive you. By Catherynne M Valente
What is a map, but a thing that gets you where you're going?-Mr. Map By Catherynne M Valente
A father is nowhere near as valuable as a spoon. By Catherynne M Valente
Nobody came without their sequins roaring. By Catherynne M Valente
Are you the only human in the world then? And all of the rest of us monsters? By Catherynne M Valente
