Catherynne M. Valente
52 quotes
Biography
Catherynne Morgan Valente is an American fiction writer, poet, and literary critic. For her speculative fiction novels she has won the annual James Tiptree, Jr.
"Stories have a way of changing faces. They are unruly things, undisciplined, given to delinquency and the throwing of erasers. This is why we must close them up into thick, solid books, so they cannot get out and cause trouble."
"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."
"For there are two kinds of forgiveness in the world: the one you practice because everything really is all right, and what went before is mended. The other kind of forgiveness you practice because someone needs desperately to be forgiven, or because you need just as badly to forgive them, for a heart can grab hold of old wounds and go sour as milk over them."
"Do not ruin today with mourning tomorrow."
"I'm not lost, because I haven't any idea where to go that I might get lost on the way to. I'd like to get lost, because then I'd know where I was going, you see."
"War is not for winning, Masha,"sighed Koschei, reading the tracks of supply lines, of pincer strategies, over her shoulder. "It is for surviving."
"Hats have power. Hats can change you into someone else."
"I have all the books I could need, and what more could I need than books?"
"Hearts set about finding other hearts the moment they are born, and between them, they weave nets so frightfully strong and tight that you end up bound forever in hopeless knots, even to the shadow of a beast you knew and loved long ago."
"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."
"Men die. It's practically what they're for."
"Just remember that the only question in a house is who is to rule. The rest is only dancing around that, trying not to look it in the eye."
"Where there is a Key, there is yet hope."
"All things are strange which are worth knowing."
"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?"
"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."
"And then she’d take off again, with a sort of confused-confounded glance down at me, as though every time she came home, it was a shock to remember that I’d ever been born."
"They are time, and time eats everything but listens to no one."
"Life is beautiful and life is stupid. This is, in fact, widely regarded as a universal rule not less inviolable than the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Uncertainty Principle, and No Post on Sundays."
"But in the end, all wars are more or less the same. If you dig down through the layers of caramel corn and peanuts and choking, burning death, you’ll find the prize at the bottom and the prize is a question and the question is this: Which of us are people and which of us are meat?"
"I don’t know why you would even bring up the Internet. The xeno-intelligence officer responsible for evaluating your digital communication required invasive emergency therapy after an hour’s exposure. One glance at that thing is the strongest argument possible against the sentience of humanity. I wouldn’t draw attention to it, if I were you."
"Everyone you know is a monster, sweetie. We’ve watched a lot of your media, you know. It’s an excellent way to evaluate societal sentience. You seem to be very concerned with monsters. Monsters from above, monsters from below, monsters among you, monsters from the sea, radioactive monsters, machine monsters, magical monsters, serial monsters who can only be stopped by monsters with badges. It’s a whole thing with you people. We got terrifically bored after a while. After all, you always win against the monsters, even though you’re the ones slowly cooking your planet because you can’t be bothered not to, butchering one another for fun and profit, making up elaborate stories that start with being calm and treating everyone with kindness and equality but somehow always end with somebody getting enslaved, absolutely obliterating the other species with whom you share a world so you can take a photograph with their corpses or gobble up their best features in hopes of achieving a more satisfying erection, and being generally willing to sell the fleeting, unique, fragile lives of everyone you’ve ever met if it means you can consume a slightly larger share of resources than they can. You can’t even agree on whether or not a sick child should get a tissue without having to really work for it. None of you seems to be able to stand one another. How will you treat us, if you are allowed to swarm across the galaxy? Which of us have horns or tusks or claws we feel quite attached to that might arouse your sluggish organs? Yes, of course, you’ve done some clever things with your time. No one is denying that rhythmic gymnastics are really just terrific. But in a clinch, you lot would rather watch someone suffer untold horrors than watch them enjoy so much as a cool drink if you don’t have two of your own, and yours have cherries in them as well as more ice and little paper umbrellas, and even then most of you would still prefer to take theirs and have three. This is not the behavior of a sentient race. It is the behavior of wild animals. Even your babies view anyone who doesn’t look just exactly like their parents with seething suspicion. It’s baked in to you. I’ll put this in words you can understand: humans are hideous, pain-guzzling, pollution-spouting space monsters who might threaten our way of life. Now, how does that usually pan out in the movies, kitten? At least we let you try to convince us we’re wrong. I doubt you asked the dodo birds what they thought about it before you blasted the last one in the face with a blunderbuss."
"What was magical at two in the morning was tawdry and cheap and dangerous to your health at two in the afternoon."
"Failure was here before you and she’ll be here after you and she won’t even notice you go."
"He’d only said what he meant, which was, when you thought about it, a minor superpower, because so few people ever did."