Quote

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.

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
Would
Hurt
Machine
Seen
Hungry
Girl
Wrote
Wanted
Machines
Nothing
Loving
Needing
Made
Bird
Whispered
Kind
Paper
Blank
Never
Magic
Birds

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But if you must be clever, then be clever. Be brave. Sleep with fists closed and shoot straight.
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Never trust anyone under one hundred!
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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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It's Latin, which is an excellent language for mischief-making, which is why governments are so fond of it.
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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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Remember this when you are queen,” he whispered hoarsely. “I moved the earth and the water for you.
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Yes, yes, mistress, I shall go and accomplish your task. Only—I was not only sent to kill the Leucrotta. There is a maiden in a tower— At this the Witch spat, again rolling her marvelous eyes. Those revolting creatures are always getting themselves locked up. If only they would stay that way.
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After love, no one is what they were before.
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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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You should always listen to minotaurs. Anybody with four stomachs has to have a firm grip on reality.
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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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Marya pinned out her childhood like a butterfly. She considered it the way a mathematician considers an equation.
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Hats have power. Hats can change you into someone else.
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The great blessing and great cruelty of youth is that there seems to be time enough.
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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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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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War is not for winning, Masha, sighed Koschei, reading the tracks of supply lines, of pincer strategies, over her shoulder. It is for surviving.
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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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Woman! Come out! I have— She looked down at the bloodless grass, embarrassed. I have come to rescue you, she finally said, as if admitting that she were covered in boils.
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