01c. 1979 ADYou will live as you live in any world,' Madame Lebedeva said. She reached out her hand as if to grasp Marya's, as if to press it to her cheek, then closed her fingers, as if Marya's hand were in hers. 'With difficulty, and grief.Catherynne M. Valente / quote ↗
02c. 1979 ADMarriage 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 / quote ↗
03c. 1979 ADI ate all of my husbands. First I ate their love, then their will, then their despair, and then I made pies of their bodies - and those bodies were so dear to me!Catherynne M. Valente / quote ↗
04c. 1979 ADI'm gonna be good at something other than marrying, darlings. Besides, I don't want them. I don't even wanna screw them, how am I gonna marry them?Catherynne M. Valente / quote ↗
05c. 1979 ADIt's a dreadful world with only your own heart to drive you.Catherynne M. Valente / quote ↗
06c. 1979 ADI 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 / quote ↗
07c. 1979 ADI got a heart like a half bottle of no-label whiskey.Nothing to brag on,but enough for you, and all your friends, too.Catherynne M. Valente / quote ↗
09c. 1979 ADA book is a door into another place and another heart and another world.Catherynne M. Valente / quote ↗
10c. 1979 ADBut 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 / quote ↗
11c. 1979 ADA 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 stayCatherynne M. Valente / quote ↗
12c. 1979 ADWishes of one's old life wither and shrivel like old leaves if they are not replaced with new wishes when the world changes. And the world always changes. Wishes get slimy, and their colors fade, and soon they are just mud, like all the rest of the mud, and not wishes at all, but regrets. The trouble is, not everyone can tell when they ought to launder their wishes. Even when one finds oneself in Fairyland and not at home at all, it is not always so easy to remember to catch the world in it's changing and change with it.Catherynne M. Valente / quote ↗
13c. 1979 ADI expect everyone in Boston has something like that ring, which is why I am glad I have never been to Boston.Catherynne M. Valente / quote ↗
14c. 1979 ADThe sun hitched up her trousers and soldiered on up into the sky. September squinted at it and wondered if the sun here was different than the sun in Nebraska. It seemed gentler, more golden, deeper. The shadows it cast seemed more profound. But September could not be sure. When one is traveling, everything looks brighter and lovelier. That does not mean that it is brighter and lovelier; it just means that sweet, kindly home suffers in comparison to tarted-up foreign places with all their jewels on.Catherynne M. Valente / quote ↗
15c. 1979 ADI have to know, I have to or else you will just rule me until the end of everything because you know and I do not.Catherynne M. Valente / quote ↗
16c. 1979 ADAnd hell, sometimes the best thing is to put on a black dress and become a wicked stepmother. There’s power in that, if you’re after power.Catherynne M. Valente / quote ↗
17c. 1979 ADLet me tell you something, kid," said Mrs. H of Boston and Beacon Hill. "Magic is just a word for what's left to the powerless once everyone else has eaten their fill.Catherynne M. Valente / quote ↗
18c. 1979 ADWhen the world changes, it stashes us away where we can't make it run the other way again.Catherynne M. Valente / quote ↗
19c. 1979 ADAl is the upside down man. Back home, you work all day and night to learn how to paint, learn linseed and cadmium and badger-hair and perspective, which is just math in art-school drag, you know? And maybe you still can't do anything worth phoning the Met over. But hey, getting a boy to fuck you is just the easiest thing since Sunday naps. Up top, getting drunk at a party is what you do when you're all out of art. But in...Canada? Are we calling it Canada now? Ok! Al's the King of Canada and he says: fuck that for a lark! The world feels like being a bastard-and-a-half this decade, let's play nine-pins on its grave. Down here it's all the same! Kiss a boy and books come out! Ralph up Parthenons into the upstairs toilet! Dance poems, shit showtunes! Art is easy! Pick up genius at the corner shop! Sell your soul and half your shoes for a glass of gin!' He looks up at Zelda Fair and his poor goblin face goes all twisted up and desperate. 'It's all fucked anyway, you see? The end of the world already happened. It's happening all the time. It's gonna happen again. And again after that. Just when you think it's done falling on its face, the world picks itself up and throws itself off a roof. Boom. Pavement. The world's ending forever and ever and we're not even allowed to toast at her funeral. So we gotta do something else or she won't know we ever loved her.Catherynne M. Valente / quote ↗
20c. 1979 ADthere is only this world, as it is now, and there has never been another, can never be any other.Catherynne M. Valente / quote ↗
21c. 1979 ADSo most people go around with grimy machinery, when all it would take is a bit of spit and polish to make them paladins once more, bold knights and true.Catherynne M. Valente / quote ↗
22c. 1979 ADLet us be greedy together; let us hoard. Let us hit each other with birch branches and lock each other in dungeons; let us drink each other's blood in the night and betray each other in the sun. Let us lie and lust and take hundreds of lovers; let us dance until snow melts between us. Let us steal and eat until we grow fat and roll in the pleasures of life, clutching each other for purchase.Catherynne M. Valente / quote ↗
23c. 1979 ADBut that wouldn't be honest. That wouldn't be real. That would give you the idea that a life is a simple thing to tell, that it's obvious where to start--BIRTH--and even more obvious where to stop--DEATH. Fade from black to black. I won't have it. I won't be one of the hundreds telling you that being alive flows like a story you write consciously, deliberately, full of linear narrative, foreshadowing, repetition, motifs. The emotional beats come down where they should, last as long as they should, end when they should, and that 'should' come from somewhere real and natural, not from the tyranny of the theatre, the utter hegemony of fiction. Why, isn't living easy? Isn't it grand? As easy as reading aloud.No.If I slice it all up and stitch it back together, you might not understand what I've been trying to say all my life: that any story is a lie cunningly told to hide the real world from the poor bastards who live in it. I can't. I can't tell you that lie...If I fixed it so time goes the way you expect, you might come away thinking I know what the hell I'm doing.Catherynne M. Valente / quote ↗
24c. 1979 ADyou have to have the right sort of stone. Peridot for mothers, girasol for lovers, sapphire for sadness, and garnet for joy.Catherynne M. Valente / quote ↗
