896 Quotes by Catherynne M. Valente

I have tried to write stories that go into the underworld of myth and bring out life and fire – where the old world looked at a woman alone and immortal and said: she must long to die, I have tried to say: look at her live!

All the rest of the nonsense a story requires is just a long seduction of the ending.

A body is never so vicious as when it has only itself to blame for its trouble.

We who were once living can guard you still, and love you, and keep you living safe and whole. Nothing ever truly dies.

But no one may know the shape of the tale in which they move. And, perhaps, we do not truly know what sort of beast it is, either. Stories have a way of changing faces. They are unruly things, undisciplined, given to delinquency and the throwing of erasers. This is why we must close them up into thick, solid books, so they cannot get out and cause trouble.

Dredge up a hostile, sulfurous silicate lava sink slaloming between two phlegmy suns well into their shuffleboard years, a miserable wad of hell-spit, free-range acid clouds, and the gravitational equivalent of untreated diabetes, a stellar expletive that should never be forced to cope with something as toxic and flammable as a civilization, and before you can say no, stop, don’t, why? the place will be crawling with postcapitalist glass balloons filled with sentient gases all called Ursula.

It appeals to the higher nature of the self to put aside food which once lived – I do not consider myself food, why should I ask all other creatures to consider themselves so?

Everything looks like magic when you don’t understand it.

A mother’s like a poison made for only one soul.