896 Quotes by Catherynne M. Valente

September had never been betrayed before. She did not even know what to call the feeling in her chest, so bitter and sour. Poor child. There is always a first time, and it is never the last time.

At the end of every adventure, you must ask if it was ever really your adventure at all. Perhaps you were only an obstacle in someone else's quest.

Don't you know how far women stretch?

I looked at this man and thought: Oh, how we are going to hurt each other.

A house is a kind of box you put a girl in.

Love is what grown folk do to each other because the law frowns on killing.

Memory is like that. It alters itself so that girlsare always trapped under the earth, waiting in the dark.

I asked a queen once why she didn’t want me. She wasn’t a powerful queen, not a monarch of Spain or of Albania. Just a little kingdom of nowhere, but she married well and she had a crown. The queen of nowhere looked at me with her clear grey eyes and said: “Because I don’t want to be in a story.” Princesses usually grow up to be queens. The cleverness sticks long after the beauty goes.

Perhaps memory is a thing that everyone involved has to work at, like stitching up a big quilt out of everything that ever happened to you.