Quotes by Catherynne M. Valente

“Memory is like that. It alters itself so that girlsare always trapped under the earth, waiting in the dark.”

“Perhaps memory is a thing that everyone involved has to work at, like stitching up a big quilt out of everything that ever happened to you.”

“Everyone has their invisible cloak of all things past.”

“Yes, Marya thought, the smell of woodsmoke and old snow pushing back her long black hair. Magic does that. It wastes you away. Once it grips you by the ear, the real world gets quieter and quieter,...”

“When you argue with verve in your saddlebags, you are extremely alive. That is why you yell and holler and shake your fist could there be anything sweeter than convincing someone to see the world ...”

“That is the trouble with standing up to people, of course. Once you start doing it, you can hardly stop.”

“Sometimes, magic is like that. It lands on your head like a piano, a stupid, ancient, unfunny joke, and you spend the rest of your life picking sharps and flats out of your hair.”

“Magic has a logic, like algebra. Once you get to know it, it's easy. If this, then that. You write with a pencil, you don't make frog soup with it.”

“All Librarians are Secret Masters of Severe Magic. Goes with the territory.”

“Do you think I am a foo, Masha? All this time, and you speak to me as though I were a flighty pinprick of a girl. I am a magician! Did you ever think, even once, that I loved lipstick and rouge for...”

“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.”

“Time is the only magic, he said, "And Marids swim through time like the sea. Think: if you hurt yourself, and I bandage it, and after weeks and weeks it gets well and there's no scar, that's not ma...”

“A Bank is but a college of Fiscal Magic.”

“However wretched her origins, she chose freely to continue her crimes against us from the moment she woke to this life. It is easy to forgive beautiful women, especially when they lay a sorrowful t...”

“Music has more rules than math or magic and it's twice as dangerous as both or either.”

“I do not serve your personal issues, Morevna. I serve the People, and the People will have crimes against their body answered. You fought at Leningrad. So did I. Why should he be spared?''Somebody ...”

“Anything is a poem if you say it often enough.”

“Squeeze your eyes closed, as tight as you can, and think of all your favorite autumns, crisp and perfect, all bound up together like a stack of cards. That is what it is like, the awful, wonderful ...”

“I savor bitterness it is born of experience. It is the privilege of one who has truly lived. You, too, must learn to prefer it. After all, when all else is gone, you may still have bitterness in a...”

“If he closed his eyes he could dwell in the circuit of air that had once held her, he could hold his breath and be inside her again, within the close and burning borders of her- she stood here, was...”