896 Quotes by Catherynne M. Valente

Everybody is bizarre and disgusting and interesting and fixated on fetishes they wouldn’t admit to their grandmother on pain of vaporization and worthy of love. You are bizarre and disgusting and interesting and fixated on fetishes you wouldn’t admit to your grandmother on pain of vaporization and worthy of love.

A book is a door into another place and another heart and another world.

There is no such thing as a good wife or a good husband. Only ones who bide their time.

The body does the living; the shadow does the dreaming.

Everybody’s strange everywhere. Most of the trick of being a social animal is pretending you’re not. But who do you fool? Nobody worth talking to.

Finally, she said: “I’m lonely” – it’s weird but you tell the wolves things, sometimes. You can’t help it, all these old wounds come open and suddenly you’re confessing to a wolf who never says anything back. She said: “I’m lonely,” and they ate her in the street.

Remember, pain is not a test. Knowledge is not enough.

Things that cannot long be kept secret: death in the family, the loss of a ring, corruption of the spirit, boredom, illicit love. Sickness. Addiction. Pregnancy.

In future days you will call John Mandeville a liar, and my shade will laugh at you and say: true, true, I was, but not always, not so. When the world was good enough in my sight, when it behaved as wildly and gorgeously as I always knew it could, I told the truth of it.