Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
First, the avid student must be aware that when the world was young it knew only seven things: water, life and death, salt, night, birds and the length of an hour.
Catherynne M. Valente
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Catherynne M. Valente
Age: 45
Born: 1979
Born: May 5
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Seattle
Washington
Cat Valente
Must
Knew
Birds
Things
Hours
Student
Life
Water
Length
World
Death
Hour
Night
Aware
Young
Bird
Firsts
Seven
Avid
First
Students
Salt
More quotes by Catherynne M. Valente
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
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
After love, no one is what they were before.
Catherynne M. Valente
She is so stubborn, her heart has an argument with her head every time it wants to beat.
Catherynne M. Valente
Humanity lived many years and ruled the earth, sometimes wisely, sometimes well, but mostly neither.
Catherynne M. Valente
I burn, I freeze I am never warm. I am rigid I forgot softness because it did not serve me.
Catherynne M. Valente
You should always listen to minotaurs. Anybody with four stomachs has to have a firm grip on reality.
Catherynne M. Valente
You can never know how your clock runs. But it does run - and always faster than you think.
Catherynne M. Valente
I perceive that you have a cruel heart, my child. It lies within your breast like a smoldering blade, hissing steam at me.
Catherynne M. Valente
She was not filled up with the sight of him, the way she had seen her sisters fill up, like silk balloons, like wineskins. Instead, he seemed to land heavily within her, like a black stone falling.
Catherynne M. Valente
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
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
We like the wrong sorts of girls, they wrote. They are usually the ones worth writing about.
Catherynne M. Valente
It's Latin, which is an excellent language for mischief-making, which is why governments are so fond of it.
Catherynne M. Valente
Never trust anyone under one hundred!
Catherynne M. Valente
Snow is the beginning and the end of everything.
Catherynne M. Valente
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
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
It is best in the end to let women see to their own vengeance.
Catherynne M. Valente
When one is traveling, everything looks brighter and lovelier.
Catherynne M. Valente