896 Quotes by Catherynne M. Valente



  • Author Catherynne M. Valente
  • Quote

    September could see it. She did not know what is was she saw. That is the disadvantage of being a heroine, rather than a narrator. She knew only that a red light glowed and went dark, glowed and went dark.

  • Tags
  • Share


  • Author Catherynne M. Valente
  • Quote

    But the thought arrived inside her like a train: Marya Morevna, all in black, here and now, was a point at which all the women she had been met—the Yaichkan and the Leningrader and the chyerti maiden; the girl who saw the birds, and the girl who never did—the woman she was and the woman she might have been and the woman she would always be, forever intersecting and colliding, a thousand birds falling from a thousand oaks, over and over.

  • Tags
  • Share

  • Author Catherynne M. Valente
  • Quote

    That stirring which had fluttered in her on first glimpsing the sea—that stirring landlocked children know so well—moved in her now, with the golden stars over head, and the green fireflies glinting on the wooded shore. She carefully unfolded the stirring that she had so tightly packed away. It billowed out like a sail, and she laughed, despite herself, despite hunger and hard things ahead.

  • Tags
  • Share


  • Author Catherynne M. Valente
  • Quote

    Don’t worry,” Marya whispered, kissing his forehead. “My old bones will follow yours soon enough.

  • Share

  • Author Catherynne M. Valente
  • Quote

    I still think of myself as a house. Ravan tried to fix this problem of self-image, as he called it. To teach me to phrase my communication in terms of a human body. To say: let us hold hands instead of let us hold kitchens. To say put our heads together and not put our parlors together. But it is not as simple as replacing words anymore. Ravan is gone. My hearth is broken.

  • Tags
  • Share