Quotes By Author: catherynne m. valente
“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.”
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“… relationships required such vigilance, such attention. You had to hold them together by force of will, and other people took up so much space, demanded so much time. It was exhausting.”
“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.”
“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.”
“You see her as you see anyone in this world: distorted, warped, reflected, refracted, contorted, mutilated by time.”
“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.”