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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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Catherynne M. Valente
Age: 45
Born: 1979
Born: May 5
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Seattle
Washington
Cat Valente
Someone
Spared
Survived
Ought

More quotes by Catherynne M. Valente

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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.
Catherynne M. Valente
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Snow is the beginning and the end of everything.
Catherynne M. Valente
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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.
Catherynne M. Valente
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Whenever one does extraordinary things, someone is bound to try to repeat them for themselves. It's the way of the world.
Catherynne M. Valente
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I wonder sometimes what the memory of God looks like. Is it a palace of infinite rooms, a chest of many jeweled objects, a long, lonely landscape where each tree recalls an eon, each pebble the life of a man? Where do I live, in the memory of God?
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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September knew a number of curse words, most of which she heard the girls at school saying in the bathrooms, in hushed voices, as if the words could make things happen just by being spoken, as if they were fairy words, and had to be handled just so.
Catherynne M. Valente
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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.
Catherynne M. Valente
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I am the Walker and the Maze.
Catherynne M. Valente
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Astolaine Bombast, catalogue woman, ordered up like a rare steak, 'plees make shore she is pritty and a whyt gurl if you have enny'.Well, she's pritty enough for homesteading but takes no ribbons at the fair. After three dead babies that fellow wanted his money back, pack her up in a box and ship her east to the wife factory.
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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We like the wrong sorts of girls, they wrote. They are usually the ones worth writing about.
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
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That’s what a map is, you know. Just a memory.
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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Metamorphosis is the most profound of all acts.
Catherynne M. Valente
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Fierce was her needle, and she wore it like a sword.
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
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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
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