896 Quotes by Catherynne M. Valente

Be my friend and love me, for the world is terrible lonely and I am sad.

Magic is just a word for what's left to the powerless once everyone else has eaten their fill.

Everyone is a criminal! We are beset on all sides by antirevolutionary forces. Naturally, then, humans fall into three categories: the criminal, the not-yet-criminal, and the not-yet-caught.

Some girls have to go to college to discover what they are good at; some are born doing what they must without even truly knowing why. I felt a hole in my heart shaped like a dark door I needed to guard.

When you can change something just by saying a word, that is magic.

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

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 your way? What else is talking for, or jokes, or stories, or battles? The Loudest Magic, and how I loved it.

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.