Quotes by Catherynne M. Valente

“Hats have power. Hats can change you into someone else.”

“You should always listen to minotaurs. Anybody with four stomachs has to have a firm grip on reality.”

“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 ginger...”

“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 youll trade for power. For the opposite of weakness, wh...”

“If you are a monster, stand up.If you are a monster, a trickster, a fiend,If youve built a steam-powered wishing machineIf you have a secret, a dark past, a scheme,If you kidnap maidens or dabble i...”

“Finally, it was all finished. September was quite proud of herself, and we may be proud of her, too, for certainly I have never made a boat so quickly, and I daresay only one or two of you have eve...”

“So a half-breed goatsnake, a Yith, and a Ghast walk into a bar.”

“We all live inside the terrible engine of authority, and it grinds and shrieks and burns so that no one will say: lines on maps are silly.”

“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 p...”

“I have to know, I have to or else you will just rule me until the end of everything because you know and I do not.”

“And hell, sometimes the best thing is to put on a black dress and become a wicked stepmother. Theres power in that, if youre after power.”

“Let me tell you something, kid," said Mrs. H of Boston and Beacon Hill. "Magic is just a word for what's left to the powerless once everyone else has eaten their fill.”

“When the world changes, it stashes us away where we can't make it run the other way again.”

“Al is the upside down man. Back home, you work all day and night to learn how to paint, learn linseed and cadmium and badger-hair and perspective, which is just math in art-school drag, you know? A...”

“there is only this world, as it is now, and there has never been another, can never be any other.”

“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 ...”

“We like the wrong sorts of girls, they wrote. They are usually the ones worth writing about.”

“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 ...”

“So most people go around with grimy machinery, when all it would take is a bit of spit and polish to make them paladins once more, bold knights and true.”

“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. ...”