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The smell of loving is a difficult one to describe, but if you think of the times when someone has held you close and made you safe, you will remember how it smells just as well as I do.

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
Think
Safe
Thinking
Times
Difficult
Smells
Someone
Describe
Remember
Held
Wells
Smell
Well
Loving
Made
Close

More quotes by Catherynne M. Valente

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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.
Catherynne M. Valente
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She knew herself, how she had slowly, over years, become a cat, a wolf, a snake, anything but a girl. How she had wrung out her girlhood like death.
Catherynne M. Valente
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Humanity lived many years and ruled the earth, sometimes wisely, sometimes well, but mostly neither.
Catherynne M. Valente
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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.
Catherynne M. Valente
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When one is traveling, everything looks brighter and lovelier. That does not mean it IS brighter and lovelier it just means that sweet, kindly home suffers in comparison to tarted-up foreign places with all their jewels on.
Catherynne M. Valente
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Someone ought to write a novel about me.
Catherynne M. Valente
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It's Latin, which is an excellent language for mischief-making, which is why governments are so fond of it.
Catherynne M. Valente
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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
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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.
Catherynne M. Valente
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Just tell yourself a story that'll satisfy you and pretend he told it.
Catherynne M. Valente
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Someone ought to write a novel about me,” said Lebedeva loftily. “I shouldn’t care if they lied to make it more interesting, as long as they were good lies, full of kisses and daring escapes and the occasional act of barbarism. I can’t abide a poor liar.
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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Why should he be spared?' 'Someone ought to be.' And it will not be me. I have survived, but I have not been spared.
Catherynne M. Valente
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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.
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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Snow is the beginning and the end of everything.
Catherynne M. Valente
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We like the wrong sorts of girls, they wrote. They are usually the ones worth writing about.
Catherynne M. Valente
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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
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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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And it's the wonders I'm after, even if I have to bleed for them.
Catherynne M. Valente