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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

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So most people go around with grimy machinery, when all it would take is a bit of spit and polish to make them paladins once more, bold knights and true.
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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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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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Koschei, Koschei,” she whispered. “What would I have been if I had never seen the birds? I am no one I am nothing. I am a blank paper on which you and your magic wrote a girl. Just the kind of girl you wanted, all hungry and hurt and needing. A machine for loving you. Nothing in me was not made by you.
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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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You should always listen to minotaurs. Anybody with four stomachs has to have a firm grip on reality.
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When one is traveling, everything looks brighter and lovelier.
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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.
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I’m a monster,” said the shadow of the Marquess suddenly. “Everyone says so.” The Minotaur glanced up at her. “So are we all, dear,” said the Minotaur kindly. “The thing to decide is what kind of monster to be. The kind who builds towns or the kind who breaks them.
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Every morning is a battle between the superego and the id, and I am a mere foot soldier with mud and a snooze button on her shield.
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I looked at this man and thought: Oh, how we are going to hurt each other.
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I am freedom and I will eat your heart
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...her cry is a hook and it catches me in the throat.
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All jobs are odd, or they would be games or naps or picnics.
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When little ones say they want to go home, they almost never mean it. They mean they are tired of this particular game and would like to start another.
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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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Readers will always insist on adventures, and though you can have grief without adventures, you cannot have adventures without grief.
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This is what comes of having a heart, even a very small and young one. It causes no end of trouble, and that’s the truth.
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Slowly, without taking his eyes from hers, the man in the black coat knelt before her. ”I have come for the girl in the window,” he said, and his eyes filled with tears
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...For grace may only be found briefly, and always in the midst of madness.
Catherynne M. Valente