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We all live inside the terrible engine of authority, and it grinds and shrieks and burns so that no one will say: lines on maps are silly.
Catherynne M. Valente
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Catherynne M. Valente
Age: 45
Born: 1979
Born: May 5
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Seattle
Washington
Cat Valente
Inside
Grind
Lines
Engine
Live
Absurdity
Engines
Maps
Silly
Shrieks
Authority
Grinds
Terrible
Burns
More quotes by Catherynne M. Valente
Men die. It's practically what they're for.
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How much better if life were more like books, if life lied a little more, and gave up its stubborn and boring adherence to the way things can be, and thought a little more imaginatively about the way things might be.
Catherynne M. Valente
Bad luck relies on absolutely perfect timing.
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That’s what happens to friends, eventually. They leave you. It’s practically what they’re for.
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Someone ought to write a novel about me.
Catherynne M. Valente
I burn, I freeze I am never warm. I am rigid I forgot softness because it did not serve me.
Catherynne M. Valente
You will always fall in love, and it will always be like having your throat cut, just that fast.
Catherynne M. Valente
It is harder, usually, to find a person who wants to walk the streets of me, to taste the teas of my country, to... immigrate, you could say.
Catherynne M. Valente
Whenever one does extraordinary things, someone is bound to try to repeat them for themselves. It's the way of the world.
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I am selfish. I am cruel. My mate cannot be less than I.
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Hearts set about finding other hearts the moment they are born, and between them, they weave nets so frightfully strong and tight that you end up bound forever in hopeless knots, even to the shadow of a beast you knew and loved long ago.
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Koschei, Koschei,” she whispered. “What would I have been if I had never seen the birds? I am no one I am nothing. I am a blank paper on which you and your magic wrote a girl. Just the kind of girl you wanted, all hungry and hurt and needing. A machine for loving you. Nothing in me was not made by you.
Catherynne M. Valente
But lost children always find each other, in the dark, in the cold. It is as though they are magnetized, and can only attract their like.
Catherynne M. Valente
It is best in the end to let women see to their own vengeance.
Catherynne M. Valente
When little ones say they want to go home, they almost never mean it. They mean they are tired of this particular game and would like to start another.
Catherynne M. Valente
So most people go around with grimy machinery, when all it would take is a bit of spit and polish to make them paladins once more, bold knights and true.
Catherynne M. Valente
First, the avid student must be aware that when the world was young it knew only seven things: water, life and death, salt, night, birds and the length of an hour.
Catherynne M. Valente
War is not for winning, Masha, sighed Koschei, reading the tracks of supply lines, of pincer strategies, over her shoulder. It is for surviving.
Catherynne M. Valente
The man who knelt before her would have sprung from her needles, even down the ghostly flecks of silver in his hair. She had not known before that she wanted all these things, that she preferred dark hair and a slightly cruel expression, that she wishes for tallness, or that a man kneeling might thrill her.
Catherynne M. Valente
All things are strange which are worth knowing.
Catherynne M. Valente
