Explore Quotes 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.

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.

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.

You will always go into that tent. You will see her scar and wonder where she got it. You will always be amazed at how one woman can have so much black hair. You will always fall in love, and it will always be like having your throat cut, just that fast. You will always run away with her. You will always lose her. You will always be a fool. You will always be dead, in a city of ice, snow falling into your ear. You have already done all of this and will do it again.

I looked at this man and thought: Oh, how we are going to hurt each other.

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.

Love rarely waits for permission.

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.

It appeals to the higher nature of the self to put aside food which once lived - I do not consider myself food, why should I ask all other creatures to consider themselves so?

Oh, quit that. Blushing is for virgins and Christians.

At the snowy summit of all these things, however, is the fact that you simply cannot go about locking your siblings in towers when they misbehave. It is unseemly and betrays a sad lack of creativity.

You were so near death that ghosts crowded around you, weeping silver tears, waiting for you with such smiles. You humans, you know, whoever built you sewed irony into your sinews.

Funny how "question" contains the word "quest" inside it, as though any small question asked is a journey through briars.

…everything has a narrative, really, and if you can’t understand a story and relate to it, figure out how you fit inside it, you’re not really alive at all.

No one is now what they were before the war. There’s just no getting any of it back.

A marriage is a private thing. It has its own wild laws, and secret histories, and savage acts, and what passes between married people is incomprehensible to outsiders. We look terrible to you, and severe, and you see our blood flying, but what we carry between us is hard-won, and we made it just as we wished it to be, just the color, just the shape.

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.

Children make prayers so thoughtlessly, building them up like sand castles—and they are always surprised when suddenly the castle becomes real, and the iron gate grinds shut.

Whenever one does extraordinary things, someone is bound to try to repeat them for themselves. It's the way of the world.

Well enough. I won't ask you if your love is true or any of that rot—it's not my place to judge. After all, I'm a naked woman chained to a wall; I've no business questioning the lifestyles of wine-makers or anyone else.

Maidens stand still, they are lovely statues and all admire them. Witches do not stand still. I was neither, but better that I err on the side of witchery, witchery that unlocks towers and empties ships.