Catherynne M. Valente Quotes

The goblins of the city may hold committees to divide a single potato, but the strong and the cruel still sit on the hill, and drink vodka, and wear black furs, and slurp borscht by the pail, like blood. Children may wear through their socks marching in righteous parades, but Papa never misses his wine with supper. Therefore, it is better to be strong and cruel than to be fair. At least, one eats better that way. And morality is more dependent on the state of one’s stomach than of one’s nation.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

September tried to show her sternness. It was becoming a habit. She could show her sternness and think about this another time, when it was quiet and no new red Moon turned somersaults in the sky. But when she reached for her sternness, all September found in her heart was the bar of a trapeze, swinging wild, inviting her to catch it....She leaned up and kissed her Marid and hoped it was the right thing. Her heart caught the bar and swung out, swung wild, over the lights and the gasps below, reaching for a pair of sure blue hands in the air and willing them to find hers.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

Once more September marveled that even the Dodo knew what she wanted to be when she was grown. She simply could not think what she herself might do. September expected that destinies, which is how she thought of professions, simply landed upon one like a crown, and ever after no one questioned or fretted over it, being sure of one’s own use in the world. It was only that somehow her crown had not yet appeared. She did hope it would hurry up.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

Names aren't loners, they're connected, even in real life. You name your kids for someone dead or what you hope they will become or what you wish you were and your parents did the same to you and that big, glittering net of names tells the story of the whole world. Names are load-bearing struts. Names are destiny.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

You haven't met your Way yet. It hasn't so much as kissed your hand! You haven't even at the door of the hall where your Way dances. But look here, look see, I've got them, I've caught them up just for you, a big bouquet of anywhere you want to go. Just pick a bloom, my girl, hold it to your pretty nose.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

But the trouble is, I do want to be surprised. I want to choose. I broke the heart of my fate so that I could choose. I never chose; I only saw a little girl who looked like me standing on a gear at the end of the world and laughing, and that's not choosing, not really. Wouldn't you rather I chose you? Wouldn't you rather I picked our future out of all the others anyone could have?

~ Catherynne M. Valente

The keeping of lists was for November an exercise kin to repeating of a rosary. She considered it neither obsessive nor compulsive, but a ritual, an essential ordering of the world into tall, thin jars containing perfect nouns. Enough nouns connected one to the other create a verb, and verbs had created everything, had skittered across the face of the void like pebbles across a frozen pond. She had not created a verb herself, but the cherry-wood cabinet in the hall contained book after book, jar after jar, vessel upon vessel, all brown as branches, and she had faith.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

The worst thing in the world is having to go back to the dark you shook off.

~ 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.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

When spring comes, I shall meet you at the Municipal Library, and you will see how much I've learned! You'll be so proud of me and love me so!''Oh, Ell, but I do love you! Right now!''One can always bear more love,' the Wyverary purred.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

September suddenly realized something. But Ell, Orrery begins with O! How can you know so much about it?The Wyverary soared high, his neck stretching into a long red ribbon, full of words and pies and relief and flying.I'm growing up! he cried.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

A Fairy must make her own way in the world, for the world will never make way for her. That, incidentally, is the First Theorem of Questing Physicks, which you’ll learn all about when you’re older and don’t care anymore.

~ 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.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

I’m not a Knight. I’m a Bishop. Or at least I am trying to be. And traveling with you is the most slantwise, backward thing I can possibly think of, which in this place probably means it’s the right thing to do.

~ 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.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

You can't trust just any old person who comes along with a hundred puffins and a pretty face!

~ Catherynne M. Valente

I know you loved both he and I, the way a mother can love two sons. And no one should be judged for loving more than they ought, only for loving not enough.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

However wretched her origins, she chose freely to continue her crimes against us from the moment she woke to this life. It is easy to forgive beautiful women, especially when they lay a sorrowful tale before you like a sugar-dusted meal. It does not mean they deserve forgiveness.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

I do not serve your personal issues, Morevna. I serve the People, and the People will have crimes against their body answered. You fought at Leningrad. So did I. Why should he be spared?''Somebody ought to be.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

If he closed his eyes he could dwell in the circuit of air that had once held her, he could hold his breath and be inside her again, within the close and burning borders of her- she stood here, washed her hair in this sink, wrote upon this wall, ate roasted chicken at this table. There was no place he could enter where she had not also been, her echoes hanging in the air like pages hung to dry. No place that did not suppurate in her absence, which was not ringed with the light of her old selves, like film burned with a cigarette.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

The burnt-off connectors and shadows where Ravan once filled my spaces— those, I think, are the sensations of grief.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

That's how you get deathless, volchitsa. Walk the same tale over and over, until you wear a groove in the world, until even if you vanished, the tale would keep turning, keep playing, like a phonograph, and you'd have to get up again, even with a bullet through your eye, to play your part and say your lines.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

This is not a lie: Memory has the taste and texture of cooked meat. Eat it and live. Remember, but only what it is licit to remember.In Aerograd, the word for meat and memory are the same.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

Memory is like that. It alters itself so that girlsare always trapped under the earth, waiting in the dark.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

Humans do not proceed in an orderly fashion from one scene to the next. Memory lies underneath happenstance, hope and dread sprawl on top. Our days and nights are their endless orgies.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

Perhaps memory is a thing that everyone involved has to work at, like stitching up a big quilt out of everything that ever happened to you.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

Everyone has their invisible cloak of all things past.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

Yes, Marya thought, the smell of woodsmoke and old snow pushing back her long black hair. 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.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

When you argue with verve in your saddlebags, you are extremely alive. That is why you yell and holler and shake your fist — could there be anything sweeter than convincing someone to see the world your way? What else is talking for, or jokes, or stories, or battles? The Loudest Magic, and how I loved it.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

That is the trouble with standing up to people, of course. Once you start doing it, you can hardly stop.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

Sometimes, magic is like that. It lands on your head like a piano, a stupid, ancient, unfunny joke, and you spend the rest of your life picking sharps and flats out of your hair.

~ 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.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

All Librarians are Secret Masters of Severe Magic. Goes with the territory.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

Do you think I am a foo, Masha? All this time, and you speak to me as though I were a flighty pinprick of a girl. I am a magician! Did you ever think, even once, that I loved lipstick and rouge for more than their color alone? I am a student of their lore, and it is arcane and hermetic beyond the dreams of alchemists. Did you ever wonder why I gave you so many pots, so many creams, so much perfume?...Cosmetics are an extension of the will. Why do you think all men paint themselves when they go to fight? When I paint my eyes to match my soup, it is not because I have nothing better to do than worry over trifles. It says, I belong here, and you will not deny me. When I streak my lips red as foxgloves, I say, Come here, male. I am your mate, and you will not deny me. When I pinch my cheeks and dust them with mother-of-pearl, I say, Death, keep off, I am your enemy and you will not deny me. I say these things, and the world listens, Masha. Because my magic is as strong as an arm. I am never denied.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

Time is the only magic, he said, And Marids swim through time like the sea. Think: if you hurt yourself, and I bandage it, and after weeks and weeks it gets well and there's no scar, that's not magic at all. But if you hurt yourself and I touch you and it heals in a moment, you'd call me magic before your skin closed. It's not magic to cook a feast, roasting and baking and frying for hours, but if you blink and it's steaming in front of you, it's a spell. If you work for what you want and save for it and plan it out just as precisely as you possibly can, it's not even surprising if you get it on the other side of a month or a year. But if you snap your fingers and it happens as soon as you want t, every wizard will want to know you socially. If you life straight through a hundred years and watch yourself unfold at one second per second, one hour per hour, that's just being alive. If you go faster, you're a time traveler. If you jump over your unfolding and see how it all comes out, that's fate. But's all healing and cooking and planning and living, just the same. The only difference is time.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

A Bank is but a college of Fiscal Magic.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

Music has more rules than math or magic and it's twice as dangerous as both or either.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

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.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

When one is traveling, everything looks brighter and lovelier. That does not mean it IS brighter and lovelier; it just means that sweet, kindly home suffers in comparison to tarted-up foreign places with all their jewels on.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

Welcome to the American sector! Feast your eyes on glorious Pluto, her wild frontier, her high standard of living, her rugged, hardworking citizens, her purple mountains majesty! Ride the mighty buffalo! Marvel at the bustling industry of the great cities of Jizo and Ascalaphus! Climb the peaks of Mt. Orcus and Mt. Chernobog!

~ Catherynne M. Valente