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You cannot escape where you come from, September. Some part of it remains inside you always, like the slender white heart in the center of the thickest onion.

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
Inside
Thickest
White
Onion
Cannot
Slender
Part
Onions
Come
September
Heart
Center
Always
Escape
Like
Remains

More quotes by Catherynne M. Valente

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Metamorphosis is the most profound of all acts.
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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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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.
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The future is a messy, motley business, little girl.
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I have all the books I could need, and what more could I need than books?
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I know you loved both he and I, the way a mother can love two sons. And no one should be judged for loving more than they ought, only for loving not enough.
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That's Venus, September thought. She was the goddess of love. It's nice that love comes on first thing in the evening, and goes out last in the morning. Love keeps the light on all night.
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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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But lost children always find each other, in the dark, in the cold. It is as though they are magnetized, and can only attract their like.
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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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Men die. It's practically what they're for.
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It appeals to the higher nature of the self to put aside food which once lived - I do not consider myself food, why should I ask all other creatures to consider themselves so?
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I looked at this man and thought: Oh, how we are going to hurt each other.
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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.
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When I saw him I thought I could curl up inside him and go to sleep and never wake up. Men are no good for that, Masha. They'll always want you working, when you're not softening their fall into bed at the end of the day.
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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.
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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.
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Funny how question contains the word quest inside it, as though any small question asked is a journey through briars.
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I perceive that you have a cruel heart, my child. It lies within your breast like a smoldering blade, hissing steam at me.
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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