Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
30 quotes
"You haven't met your Way yet. It hasn't so much as kissed your hand! You haven't even at the door of the hall where your Way dances. But look here, look see, I've got them, I've caught them up just for you, a big bouquet of anywhere you want to go. Just pick a bloom, my girl, hold it to your pretty nose."
Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
"You should always listen to minotaurs. Anybody with four stomachs has to have a firm grip on reality."
Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
"Marriage is a wrestling match where you hold on tight while your mate changes into a hundred different things. The trick is that you're changing into a hundred other things, but you can't let go. You can only try to match up and never turn into a wolf while he's a rabbit, or a mouse while he's still busy being an owl, a brawny black bull while he's a little blue crab scuttling for shelter. It's harder than it sounds."
Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
"It's a dreadful world with only your own heart to drive you."
Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
"I was meeting a mountain. I meant to kiss her in secret. I meant to wed her under the midnight dark. The prettiest mountain you ever saw, sparkling with snow in all the right places, rich with granite and tourmaline and silver, sturdy and sensible and weathered by experience of eons. When she saw me, my mountain's pine trees bristled and the wind in her heights whistled my name. When I saw her, I felt rivers break through the rock of my heart and carve me into a new shape."
Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
"But the trick most folk are so awfully fond of learning, the absolute second they've got hold of a heart, is to pretend they don't have one at all. It is the very first danger of the hearted."
Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
"A heart can learn ever so many tricks, and what sort of beast it becomes depends greatly upon whether it has been taught to sit up or to lie down, to speak or to beg, to roll over or to sound alarms, to guard or to attack, to find or to stay"
Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
"you have to have the right sort of stone. Peridot for mothers, girasol for lovers, sapphire for sadness, and garnet for joy."
Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
"But the trouble is, I do want to be surprised. I want to choose. I broke the heart of my fate so that I could choose. I never chose; I only saw a little girl who looked like me standing on a gear at the end of the world and laughing, and that's not choosing, not really. Wouldn't you rather I chose you? Wouldn't you rather I picked our future out of all the others anyone could have?"
Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
"September suddenly realized something. "But Ell, Orrery begins with O! How can you know so much about it?"The Wyverary soared high, his neck stretching into a long red ribbon, full of words and pies and relief and flying."I'm growing up!" he cried."
Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
"You can't trust just any old person who comes along with a hundred puffins and a pretty face!"
Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
"Everyone has their invisible cloak of all things past."
Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
"When you argue with verve in your saddlebags, you are extremely alive. That is why you yell and holler and shake your fist — could there be anything sweeter than convincing someone to see the world your way? What else is talking for, or jokes, or stories, or battles? The Loudest Magic, and how I loved it."
Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
"That is the trouble with standing up to people, of course. Once you start doing it, you can hardly stop."
Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
"All Librarians are Secret Masters of Severe Magic. Goes with the territory."
Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
"A Bank is but a college of Fiscal Magic."
Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
"Music has more rules than math or magic and it's twice as dangerous as both or either."
Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
"She had a highly developed sense of humor which in some lights looked a bit like a sense of justice."
Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
"How we would like to argue with September, and tell her that in the waiting lies the pleasure! That we here in the world of sensible folk know how to wait without twisted-up bellies and tapping feet and wishing for the sun to hurry up and rise and set. That a clever person is never bored, and a bored person is never clever. But though I am sly, I am a trickster, I am even cruel—I cannot lie."
Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
"The Glasshobs built it to keep an eye on the stars, who have a tendency to run off on adventures and forget about how much we down-below folks need to navigate and cast horoscopes and meet lovers on balconies."
Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
"All jobs are odd, or they would be games or naps or picnics."
Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
"And the answer is: You are wrong. The Faeries are not gone. But they are no longer what they were. I watched it and did not help them, though I could have. I cheered. I cheered and I wept and I was glad. Perhaps I should not have been. Perhaps laughing at agony is a Fairy's game and I should not have moved my pieces on their board."
Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
"September drank in the starry sky with a longing and a tugging and a sigh. All the way up, to that enormous crescent in the black."
Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
"Storytelling can save you. Both the telling and the listening."
Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
"Of all the Fairy strangeness she had known, this seemed suddenly both the strangest and least strange of all. How she would have liked to be looked after like that, cared for and watched over. And yet at the same time, she understood the Whelk, and wished she could grow big enough to hold on to everyone she loved at once. To keep them safe and with her always and know their secret needs well enough to answer them."
Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two