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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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Catherynne M. Valente
Age: 45
Born: 1979
Born: May 5
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Seattle
Washington
Cat Valente
Nothing
Skin
Like
Skins
Whose
Safe
Name
Seen
Names
Nightmares
Without
Nightmare

More quotes by Catherynne M. Valente

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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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He missed you like a fish in a bowl misses the open sea.
Catherynne M. Valente
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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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For though, as we have said, all children are heartless, this is not precisely true of teenagers. Teenage hearts are raw and new, fast and fierce, and they do not know their own strength. Neither do they know reason or restraint, and if you want to know the truth, a goodly number of grown-up hearts never learn it.
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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.
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Everybody's strange everywhere. Most of the trick of being a social animal is pretending you're not. But who do you fool? Nobody worth talking to.
Catherynne M. Valente
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You will always fall in love, and it will always be like having your throat cut, just that fast.
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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.
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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Her father’s shadow looked sadly down at her. “You can never forget what you do in a war, September my love. No one can. You won’t forget your war either.
Catherynne M. Valente
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All jobs are odd, or they would be games or naps or picnics.
Catherynne M. Valente
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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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Just remember that the only question in a house is who is to rule. The rest is only dancing around that, trying not to look it in the eye.
Catherynne M. Valente
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In his own country, Death can be kind.
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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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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...her cry is a hook and it catches me in the throat.
Catherynne M. Valente
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In both marriage and war you must cut up the things people say like a cake and eat only what you can stomach.
Catherynne M. Valente
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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
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It is such hard work to keep your heart hidden! And worse, by the time you find it easy, it will be harder still to show it. It is a terrible magic in this world to ask for exactly the thing you want. Not least because to know exactly the thing you want and look it in the eye is a long, long labor.
Catherynne M. Valente