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Stories,' the green-eyed Sigrid said, unperturbed, 'are like prayers. It does not matter when you begin, or when you end, only that you bend a knee and say the words.

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
Stories
Bend
Doe
Prayers
Matter
Knees
Like
Green
Begin
Prayer
Unperturbed
Words
Eyed
Ends
Knee

More quotes by Catherynne M. Valente

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Whenever one does extraordinary things, someone is bound to try to repeat them for themselves. It's the way of the world.
Catherynne M. Valente
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I am freedom and I will eat your heart
Catherynne M. Valente
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I wonder sometimes what the memory of God looks like. Is it a palace of infinite rooms, a chest of many jeweled objects, a long, lonely landscape where each tree recalls an eon, each pebble the life of a man? Where do I live, in the memory of God?
Catherynne M. Valente
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Even if you’ve taken off every stitch of clothing, you still have your secrets, your history, your true name. It’s hard to be really naked. You have to work hard at it. Just getting into a bath isn’t being naked, not really. It’s just showing skin.
Catherynne M. Valente
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Marya Morevna, we are better at this than you are. We can hold two terrible ideas at once in our hearts. Never have your folk delighted us more, been more like family. For a devil, hypocrisy is a parlour game, like charades. Such fun, and when the evening is done we shall be holding our bellies to keep from dying of laughter.
Catherynne M. Valente
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Slowly, without taking his eyes from hers, the man in the black coat knelt before her. ”I have come for the girl in the window,” he said, and his eyes filled with tears
Catherynne M. Valente
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You can never know how your clock runs. But it does run - and always faster than you think.
Catherynne M. Valente
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No, not like this, when I have not seen you without your skin on, when I know nothing, when I am not safe. Not you, whose name all my nightmares know.
Catherynne M. Valente
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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
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That’s what a map is, you know. Just a memory.
Catherynne M. Valente
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Never trust anyone under one hundred!
Catherynne M. Valente
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I savor bitterness - it is born of experience. It is the privilege of one who has truly lived.
Catherynne M. Valente
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It is true that novelists are shameless and obey no decent law, and they are not to be trusted on any account, but some Mysteries even they must honor.
Catherynne M. Valente
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When one is traveling, everything looks brighter and lovelier.
Catherynne M. Valente
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Temptation likes best those who think they have a natural immunity, for it may laugh all the harder when they succumb.
Catherynne M. Valente
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However wretched her origins, she chose freely to continue her crimes against us from the moment she woke to this life. It is easy to forgive beautiful women, especially when they lay a sorrowful tale before you like a sugar-dusted meal. It does not mean they deserve forgiveness.
Catherynne M. Valente
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To touch a person...to sleep with a person...is to become a pioneer, she whispered then, a frontiersman at the edge of their private world, the strange, incomprehensible world of their interior, filled with customs you could never imitate, a language which sounds like your own but is really totally foreign, knowable only to them.
Catherynne M. Valente
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He missed you like a fish in a bowl misses the open sea.
Catherynne M. Valente
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... but as has been said, September read often, and liked it best when words did not pretend to be simple, but put on their full armor and rode out with colors flying.
Catherynne M. Valente
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Everyone is a criminal! We are beset on all sides by antirevolutionary forces. Naturally, then, humans fall into three categories: the criminal, the not-yet-criminal, and the not-yet-caught.
Catherynne M. Valente