Quotes By Author: Catherynne M. Valente
“You see her as you see anyone in this world: distorted, warped, reflected, refracted, contorted, mutilated by time.”
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“Time is communal, Marya Morevna, the most purely communal of all commodities. It belongs to us all equally.”
“Eternity takes forever. The infinite expanse of time just does not know when to quit.”
“But which one is right? The real gods? The truth?’ I asked.Balthazar smiled gently, as if speaking to a very slow child. ‘That is not for us to judge. Each of us believes what seems true enough to him, and allows others the same luxury. Who can know what happened in the dim dawn of the world? We can barely decide what to have for breakfast without a theological debate – the Nurian law is polite disagreement. We do our best with how the world appears to our own eyes.”
“And as we watched, the Tsar of Death lifted up his eyelids like skirts and began to dance in the streets of Leningrad.”
“Death is not a checkmate…it is more like a carnival trick. You cannot win, no matter how you move your Queen.”
“Robots are like Mars: they needgirls. Boys won’t do;the memesoup is all wrong. They stompwhen they should kissand they’re none too keenon having things shoved inside them…It’s not a robotuntil you put a girl inside. Sometimes I feel like that. A junkyard the Company forgot to put a girl in.”
“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.”
“Men die. It’s practically what they’re for.”
“Where there is a Key, there is yet hope.”
“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.”
“The rapt pupil will be forgiven for assuming the Tsar of Death to be wicked and the Tsar of Life to be virtuous. Let the truth be told: There is no virtue anywhere. Life is sly and unscrupulous, a blackguard, wolfish, severe. In service to itself, it will commit any offense. So, too, is Death possessed of infinite strategies and a gaunt nature- but also mercy, also grace and tenderness. In his own country, Death can be kind.”
“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.”
“You should always listen to minotaurs. Anybody with four stomachs has to have a firm grip on reality.”