“ We like the wrong sorts of girls, they wrote. They are usually the ones worth writing about. Catherynne M. Valente
“ I do so love my witches and wicked queens. I find myself drawn to feminine archetypes that previous generations have found threatening or dangerous: crones, oracles, madwomen, Amazons, virgins who are… Catherynne M. Valente
“ Marya Morevna, we are better at this than you are. We can hold two terrible ideas at once in our hearts. Never have your folk delighted us more, been more like family. For a devil, hypocrisy is a parl… Catherynne M. Valente
“ 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, whic… Catherynne M. Valente
“ And in her long nights, in her long house of smoke and miller's stones, she baked the bread we eat in dreams, strangest loaves, her pies full of anguish and days long dead, her fairy-haunted gingerbre… Catherynne M. Valente
“ War must always be done out of sight, it shocks people and they stop immediately. 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. Catherynne M. Valente
“ Such lonely, lost things you find on your way. It would be easier, if you were the only one lost. But lost children always find each other, in the dark, in the cold. It is as though they are magnetize… Catherynne M. Valente
“ That’s what happens to friends, eventually. They leave you. It’s practically what they’re for. Catherynne M. Valente
“ All time is mean young man. It takes and does not give, it rushes when you wish it would linger and drags when you wish is would fly. It flows sullenly, only in one direction, when it might take a tho… Catherynne M. Valente
“ ... relationships required such vigilance, such attention. You had to hold them together by force of will, and other people took up so much space, demanded so much time. It was exhausting. Catherynne M. Valente
“ To touch a person...to sleep with a person...is to become a pioneer," she whispered then, "a frontiersman at the edge of their private world, the strange, incomprehensible world of their interior, fil… Catherynne M. Valente
“ Hearts set about finding other hearts the moment they are born, and between them, they weave nets so frightfully strong and tight that you end up bound forever in hopeless knots, even to the shadow of… Catherynne M. Valente
“ First, the avid student must be aware that when the world was young it knew only seven things: water, life and death, salt, night, birds and the length of an hour. Catherynne M. Valente
“ If you are a monster, stand up.If you are a monster, a trickster, a fiend,If you’ve built a steam-powered wishing machineIf you have a secret, a dark past, a scheme,If you kidnap maidens or dabble in… 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. 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. Catherynne M. Valente
