Quotes by Catherynne M. Valente

“When I was a young girl, I studied Greek in school. It's a beautiful language and ever so many good things were written in it. When you speak Greek, it feels like a little bird flapping its wings o...”

“It's a dreadful world with only your own heart to drive you.”

“I was meeting a mountain. I meant to kiss her in secret. I meant to wed her under the midnight dark. The prettiest mountain you ever saw, sparkling with snow in all the right places, rich with gran...”

“I wonder sometimes what the memory of God looks like. Is it a palace of infinite rooms, a chest of many jeweled objects, a long, lonely landscape where each tree recalls an eon, each pebble the lif...”

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

“Her fathers shadow looked sadly down at her. You can never forget what you do in a war, September my love. No one can. You wont forget your war either.”

“We love WWII because the cause was so obviously just, because you can't be a good person and say you wouldn't fight against an evil like that. It was so black and white on our side, and on our side...”

“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.”

“Dreams keep the heart alive.”

“A book is a door into another place and another heart and another world.”

“But the trick most folk are so awfully fond of learning, the absolute second they've got hold of a heart, is to pretend they don't have one at all. It is the very first danger of the hearted.”

“A heart can learn ever so many tricks, and what sort of beast it becomes depends greatly upon whether it has been taught to sit up or to lie down, to speak or to beg, to roll over or to sound alarm...”

“War must always be done out of sight, it shocks people and they stop immediately.”

“Death is not a checkmateit is more like a carnival trick. You cannot win, no matter how you move your Queen.”

“Wishes of one's old life wither and shrivel like old leaves if they are not replaced with new wishes when the world changes. And the world always changes. Wishes get slimy, and their colors fade, a...”

“...while epic fantasy is based on the fairy tale of the just war, thats not one youll find in Grimm or Disney, and most will never recognize the shape of it. I think the fantasy genre pitches its t...”

“I expect everyone in Boston has something like that ring, which is why I am glad I have never been to Boston.”

“The sun hitched up her trousers and soldiered on up into the sky. September squinted at it and wondered if the sun here was different than the sun in Nebraska. It seemed gentler, more golden, deepe...”

“And as we watched, the Tsar of Death lifted up his eyelids like skirts and began to dance in the streets of Leningrad.”

“Stories have a way of changing faces. They are unruly things, undisciplined, given to delinquency and the throwing of erasers. This is why we must close them up into thick, solid books, so they can...”