Quotes by 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 aren’t helpless, bad mothers. I love to give the vagina dentata voice. It so rarely gets to speak for itself.

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

Nothing real is pretty, she said. Only a doll is pretty. And a pretty doll drinks out of a tiny cup forever. A woman wants a big cup.

Trouble is, most times, when you go looking to sell your soul, nobodys buying.

It is well known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else.

Those were all big words, to be sure, but as has been said, September read often, and liked it best when words did not pretend to be simple, but put on their full armor and rode out with colors flying.

Long before you were born a man decided that there could be a very simple test to determine if a machine was intelligent. Not only intelligent, but aware, possessed of a psychology. The test had only one question. Can a machine converse with a human with enough facility that the human could not tell that she was talking to a machine? I always thought this was cruel--the test depends entirely upon a human judge and human feelings, whether the machine feels intelligent to the observer. It privileges the observer, the human, to a crippling degree. It seeks only believably human responses. It wants perfect mimicry, not a new thing. Its a mirror in which men wish only to see themselves.

Your pasts a private matter, sweetheart. You just keep it locked up in xbox where it cant hurt anyone.

A body can only deliver up the truth its bones know, Its blood, which is its history.

I thought: this is how you make a human being. A human being is beautiful and sick. A human being glitters and starves.

Sibyl, what do you want?”“I want to live,” the Sibyl said, and her voice rang rich and full. “I want to keep on living forever and watching heroes and fools and knights go up and down, into the world and out. I want to keep being myself and mind the work that minds me. Work is not always a hard thing that looms over your years. Sometimes, work is the gift of the world to the wanting.

You will live as you live in any world, Madame Lebedeva said. She reached out her hand as if to grasp Maryas, as if to press it to her cheek, then closed her fingers, as if Maryas hand were in hers. With difficulty, and grief.

Marriage is a wrestling match where you hold on tight while your mate changes into a hundred different things. The trick is that youre changing into a hundred other things, but you cant let go. You can only try to match up and never turn into a wolf while hes a rabbit, or a mouse while hes still busy being an owl, a brawny black bull while hes a little blue crab scuttling for shelter. Its harder than it sounds.

I ate all of my husbands. First I ate their love, then their will, then their despair, and then I made pies of their bodies - and those bodies were so dear to me!

Im gonna be good at something other than marrying, darlings. Besides, I dont want them. I dont even wanna screw them, how am I gonna marry them?

Its 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 granite and tourmaline and silver, sturdy and sensible and weathered by experience of eons. When she saw me, my mountains pine trees bristled and the wind in her heights whistled my name. When I saw her, I felt rivers break through the rock of my heart and carve me into a new shape.

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.