896 Quotes by Catherynne M. Valente

Oh, September. My best girl. I shall tell you an awful, wonderful, unhappy, joyful secret: It is like that for everyone. One day you wake up and you are grown. And on the inside, you are no older than the last time you thought Wouldn’t it be lovely to be all Grown-Up right this second?

Chyerti – that’s us, demons and devils, small and big – are compulsive. We obsess. It’s our nature. We turn on a track, around and around; we march in step; we act out the same tales, over and over, the same sets of motions, while time piles up like yarn under a wheel. We like patterns. They’re comforting. Sometimes little things change – a car instead of a house, a girl not named Yelena. But it’s no different, not really. Not ever.

Hey there,” the steely abomination said with infinite, Buddha-like compassion, “it looks like you’re trying to come to grips with the existence of events and entities far beyond your experience and, as a result, are currently undergoing a small, entirely understandable, psychological break. Would you like help?

You can’t kiss a girl into anything.

Being a troll, he loved the earth. A troll’s love for the earth is a peculiar thing – it is something like the way you and I love our parents and our dogs and our favorite novels and the stuffed rabbits we have had since we were in our cradles and the very best thing we have ever done with our own two hands, all smashed up together in a rough, enormous ball of feeling the size of a planet.

All time is mean young man. It takes and does not give, it rushes when you wish it would linger and drags when you wish is would fly. It flows sullenly, only in one direction, when it might take a thousand turns. You cannot get anything back once time has taken it. Time cheats and steals and lies and kills. If anyone could arrest it, they would have time behind bars faster than you can check your watch.

It was on the to-do list, but you know to-do lists. They get longer and longer until you might as well just carve the last items on your tombstone. Do the dishes.

Magic has a logic, like algebra. Once you get to know it, it’s easy. If this, then that. You write with a pencil, you don’t make frog soup with it.

I’ll put this in words you can understand: humans are hideous, pain-guzzling, pollution-spouting space monsters who might threaten our way of life.