896 Quotes by Catherynne M. Valente

She’s got a man’s nightshirt on and stockings with holes in them. Somebody else’s tie, a gold and green chevroned number, hangs around her neck and just at this moment it looks like a king’s mantle draped over her shoulders. Her hair’s all loose, her lipstick and eyeliner gone a-roving. She’s got a cigar in one hand and a jar full of gin in the other, and she’s laughing, laughing like for once that damned chicken crossed the road for something really good.

Punishment doesn’t mean you aren’t loved. On the contrary. You can only punish someone you love.

Endings are lush and lascivious, Vince; they call to me. All spread out on satin inevitabilities, waiting, beckoning, promising impossibly, obscenely elegant solutions – if you’ve been a good lad and dressed the house just so, for its comfort, for its arousal. All the rest of the nonsense a story requires is must a long seduction of the ending.

Love, I’ve never been anyone’s mother; I don’t know how to talk to young or old. But don’t stop smiling just because I flap my mouth and say something that’s not dressed around the edges like a lace tablecloth. Thicken up and we’ll get along fine.

Fairyland is a very Scientifick place. We subscribe to all the best journals.

Magic is just a word for what’s left to the powerless once everyone else has eaten their fill.

I shall not be afraid of anything I haven’t even seen yet. If Fairyland-Below is a terrible place, well, I shall feel sorry for it. But it might be a wonderful place! Just because the wild striped cats don’t know what diamonds are doesn’t mean they’re vicious; it just means they have wildcat sorts of wants and wealth and ways of thinking, and perhaps I could learn them and be a little wilder and cattier and stripier myself.

I savor bitterness – it is born of experience. It is the privilege of one who has truly lived.

She got, instead, a towering confection that might have thought about becoming a sandwich at one point, but had gotten greater ambitions along the way.