896 Quotes by Catherynne M. Valente

Names aren't loners, they're connected, even in real life. You name your kids for someone dead or what you hope they will become or what you wish you were and your parents did the same to you and that big, glittering net of names tells the story of the whole world. Names are load-bearing struts. Names are destiny.

Monsters, you know, cannot appreciate the niceties of commandments carved in stone.

Monsters almost always are culture's way of working out their fears.

Are you the only human in the world then? And all of the rest of us monsters?

A voice saying that other word an alive thing must learn, that other word as necessary to living as taking in fuel and making of it movement, music, leaves, roots, dimetrodon spikes, dancing, libraries, children:Yes! Yes! Yes!

And the answer is: You are wrong. The Faeries are not gone. But they are no longer what they were. I watched it and did not help them, though I could have. I cheered. I cheered and I wept and I was glad. Perhaps I should not have been. Perhaps laughing at agony is a Fairy's game and I should not have moved my pieces on their board.

It calmed him to collect the things he knew and did not speak of.

It's a fairy tale. A children's story. Not a funny or silly one, but one with blood and death and horror, because that's fairy tales, too. A kid got swallowed by a whale. A little Pinocchio. A little Caliban. It's all there. And, you know, in a fairy tale, the maidens are never dead - not really. They're just sleeping.

The burnt-off connectors and shadows where Ravan once filled my spaces— those, I think, are the sensations of grief.