896 Quotes by Catherynne M. Valente

I am the plague which will burn through the marrow of the Anointed City.

You can't get into the real meat of hatred and eternal enmity without love and betrayal, without that, it's just an argument with occasional gun music. The good stuff, the all-obliterating all-annihilating one-for-the-novels mano-a-mano crackling on the pork roast, that has to come, as the hermits will tell you, from attachment.

Eternity takes forever. The infinite expanse of time just does not know when to quit.

How much easier, to be hard, bright and heartless. Instead, a very adult thing was happening in that green, new heart. For there are two kinds of forgiveness in the world: the one you practice because everything really is all right, and what went before is mended. The other kind of forgiveness you practice because someone needs desperately to be forgiven, or because you need just as badly to forgive them, for a heart can grab hold of old wounds and go sour as milk over them.

you have to have the right sort of stone. Peridot for mothers, girasol for lovers, sapphire for sadness, and garnet for joy.

In Yaichka [Яичка], they say a child draws her first breath through her ears, her second through her eyes, and her third through her mouth. . . . The first breath is for the mother, the second breath is for God, and the third breath is for the father. The breath through the mouth brings the most pleasure, and we forget immediately that we ever knew how to breathe any other way.

Histories are instruments of oppression.

Who are you?""I am Death," said the creature. "I thought that was obvious.""But you're so small!""Only because you are small. You are young and far from your Death, September, so I seem as anything would seem if you saw it from a long way off-very small, very harmless. But I am always closer than I appear. As you grow, I shall grow with you, until at the end, I shall loom huge and dark over your bed, and you will shut your eyes so as not to see me.

I suppose if you have ten children one of them might go into government, which is the same as losing a child really.