Where human children have years and years in which to grow their hearts and learn to live with them while staying safe from all the troubles a heart hauls with it, a Changeling starts out raw and red and full of longing. Some small ones learn to stitch together a Coat of Scowls r s SCarf of Jokes to hide their Hearts. Some hammer up a Fort of Books to protect theirs. Some walk around naked, though no one can see it but you and I.

— Catherynne M. Valente

Catherynne M. Valente Quotes

I eat, I perspire, I sleep, I excrete, I regret my choices, I yearn for the past. I have a very full schedule.

— Catherynne M. Valente

Mornings are not for company. They are for feeling cross and checking crab cages.

— Catherynne M. Valente

Be a good neighbor and you will have good neighbors.

— Catherynne M. Valente

I was better than a punk. I was a protaganist.

— Catherynne M. Valente

What was the point of a world without debilitating bitterness and despair? How could you even tell you were alive? How could you possibly write a decent pop song if you weren’t a sad sack of tissues or at least fundamentally angry at the world most of the time?

— Catherynne M. Valente

I want to be myself again. I want to be six. I want to stop knowing everything I know.

— Catherynne M. Valente

If I let him do this to me, what else will I allow? Anything, anything, anything.

— Catherynne M. Valente

You are my treasure, my pale gold, the heart of my heart. You lie at the bottom of my being and gnaw upon my roots.

— Catherynne M. Valente

The first lights of dawn, luminous and blue, filtered down through the fine fabric of leaves, writing in rose and silver shadows on their skin.

— Catherynne M. Valente

Orpheus asks his mother. She tells him the obvious: the entrance to hell is always in your own house, silly billy.

— Catherynne M. Valente

What if we just all read things, and talked about them, and sometimes we liked them and sometimes we didn’t and most of the time we didn’t agree at all, and then we all went and read more things, and repeated the dance all over again?

— Catherynne M. Valente

Let it be over”, she pleaded within herself. “Let it never have happened – any of it. Let me be young again, and the story just starting.

— Catherynne M. Valente

Here’s what you have to understand about intergalactic civil wars: they’re functionally identical to the knockdown, door-slamming, plate-smashing, wall-penetrating, shriek-sobbing drama of any high-strung couple you’ve ever met.

— Catherynne M. Valente

They don’t know I’m beloved. But I know and that’s plenty.

— Catherynne M. Valente

But it feels so good to be held, it feels so good to be spoken to like she is capable and wise, to hear her life gain weight, fed by Cascavel. Fed by being seen.

— Catherynne M. Valente

And in my dream, if the fathers and mothers loved their sons and daughters and sang to them in their cradles, they made a good country, and if they didn’t, they made a tyranny, so whether existence is a bloodbath or a bubble bath could hinge on whether a little child got kissed good night with a story and a glass of water or sent to bed without snuggles or a snack or a cohesive philosophy of justice.

— Catherynne M. Valente

Can you imagine there being so many people that you could just murder one and nobody would know who did it right away?

— Catherynne M. Valente

But it is my experience that you learn everything in this world out of order. You only know what you needed to know after it’s already done getting ruined all over you.

— Catherynne M. Valente

Don’t apologize, you were very fair.” Dess sipped his tea. “The defense will stipulate that we’re rubbish. Genocidal meatbags with mummy issues and embarrassingly poor impulse control.

— Catherynne M. Valente

Is she happy? She doesn’t understand. She has never considered it. It is possible to be so entirely happy you never ask the question. She is a full glass submerged in water. Neither nor both full and empty. The inquiry, though kind, has no meaning for her.

— Catherynne M. Valente
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