Explore Quotes by Catherynne M. Valente

These are the folk who may pass into the kingdom of heaven: the grief-stricken, lovers, scholars of a certain obsessive disposition. Brute beasts. Women who have become as men and men who have become as women. Writers of books with long titles. Only those knights who have failed to touch the Grail. Industrious women. You, and I, and a boy named Oleg, and a girl with blue hair.

After love, no one is what they were before.

I'm not lost, because I haven't any idea where to go that I might get lost on the way to. I'd like to get lost, because then I'd know where I was going, you see.

Someone ought to write a novel about me.

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.

I am selfish. I am cruel. My mate cannot be less than I.

He missed you like a fish in a bowl misses the open sea.

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.

Family is a transitive property.

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

Marriage is a wrestling match where you hold on tight while your mate changes into a hundred different things. The trick is that you're changing into a hundred other things, but you can't let go. You can only try to match up and never turn into a wolf while he's a rabbit, or a mouse while he's still busy being an owl, a brawny black bull while he's a little blue crab scuttling for shelter. It's harder than it sounds.

In both marriage and war you must cut up the things people say like a cake and eat only what you can stomach.

You can never know how your clock runs. But it does run - and always faster than you think.

Snow is the beginning and the end of everything.

She is so stubborn, her heart has an argument with her head every time it wants to beat.

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

This is what it means to be a woman in this world. Every step is a bargain with pain. Make your black deals in the black wood and decide what you’ll trade for power. For the opposite of weakness, which is not strength but hardness. I am a trap, but so is everything. Pick your price. I am a huckster with a hand in your pocket. I am freedom and I will eat your heart.

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

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

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.

When I say forever,' Koschei whispered, 'I mean until the black death of the world. An Ivan means just the present moment, the flickering light of it, in a green field, his mouth on yours. He means the stretching of that moment. But forever isn't bright; it isn't like that. Forever is cold and hard and final.