Quote

Magic does that. It wastes you away. Once it grips you by the ear, the real world gets quieter and quieter, until you can hardly hear it at all.

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
Hear
Grips
Away
Deathless
Doe
Wastes
Real
Hardly
World
Ears
Waste
Magic
Gets
Quieter

More quotes by Catherynne M. Valente

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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.
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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.
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And it's the wonders I'm after, even if I have to bleed for them.
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Astolaine Bombast, catalogue woman, ordered up like a rare steak, 'plees make shore she is pritty and a whyt gurl if you have enny'.Well, she's pritty enough for homesteading but takes no ribbons at the fair. After three dead babies that fellow wanted his money back, pack her up in a box and ship her east to the wife factory.
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It is best in the end to let women see to their own vengeance.
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All jobs are odd, or they would be games or naps or picnics.
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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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She was not filled up with the sight of him, the way she had seen her sisters fill up, like silk balloons, like wineskins. Instead, he seemed to land heavily within her, like a black stone falling.
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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?
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In his own country, Death can be kind.
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She is so stubborn, her heart has an argument with her head every time it wants to beat.
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Do not ruin today with mourning tomorrow.
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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.
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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.
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And if they thought her aimless, if they thought her a bit mad, let them. It meant they left her alone. Marya was not aimless, anyway. She was thinking.
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We all just keep moving, September. We keep moving until we stop.
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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.
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When one is traveling, everything looks brighter and lovelier.
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She did not want to read this book from start to finish, or rather, she thought perhaps it did not want her to. Instead she practiced the art of bibliomancy, trusting the book to show her what it wanted her to know.
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Death stands behind every bride, every groom.
Catherynne M. Valente