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

More quotes by Catherynne M. Valente

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It is well known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else.
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Tell it fast before you get scared and silence yourself. You'll never wish you'd held back a little more.
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He missed you like a fish in a bowl misses the open sea.
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That’s what a map is, you know. Just a memory.
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Temperament, you'll find, is highly dependent on time of day, weather, frequency of naps, and whether one has had enough to eat.
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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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You humans, you know, whoever built you sewed irony into your sinews.
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I savor bitterness - it is born of experience. It is the privilege of one who has truly lived.
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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.
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And as we watched, the Tsar of Death lifted up his eyelids like skirts and began to dance in the streets of Leningrad.
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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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The great blessing and great cruelty of youth is that there seems to be time enough.
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You only had to choose which me to talk to, for, you know, we all change our manners, depending on who has come to chat. One doesn’t behave at all the same way to a grandfather as to a bosom friend, to a professor as to a curious niece.
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I will not let her speak because I love her, and when you love someone, you do not make them tell war stories. A war story is a black space. On the one side is before and on the other side is after, and what is inside belongs only to the dead.
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You can never know how your clock runs. But it does run - and always faster than you think.
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You and I, being grown-up and having lost our hearts at least twice or thrice along the way, might shut our eyes and cry out: Not that way, child! But as we have said, September was Somewhat Heartless, and felt herself reasonably safe on that road. Children always do.
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Never put your faith in a Prince. When you require a miracle, trust in a Witch.
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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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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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Well, very splendid and very frightening. But splendid things are often frightening. Sometimes, it's the fright that makes them splendid at all.
Catherynne M. Valente