The collection / 265 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01c. 1979 AD

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.

Catherynne M. Valente / quote

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02c. 1979 AD

War is not for winning, Masha," sighed Koschei, reading the tracks of supply lines, of pincer strategies, over her shoulder. "It is for surviving.

Catherynne M. Valente / quote

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03c. 1979 AD

Do not ruin today with mourning tomorrow.

Catherynne M. Valente / quote

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04c. 1979 AD

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.

Catherynne M. Valente / quote

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05c. 1979 AD

However unlikely it may seem, it is the truth and, therefore, one hundred percent likely.

Catherynne M. Valente / quote

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06c. 1979 AD

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?

Catherynne M. Valente / quote

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07c. 1979 AD

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.

Catherynne M. Valente / quote

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08c. 1979 AD

Hats have power. Hats can change you into someone else.

Catherynne M. Valente / quote

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09c. 1979 AD

You should always listen to minotaurs. Anybody with four stomachs has to have a firm grip on reality.

Catherynne M. Valente / quote

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10c. 1979 AD

Their happiness was the kind which is fashioned of the comfortable disorder of sauvignon bottles and coffee cups in the sink, paperback thrillers with split spines on the nightstand, bathrobes hung haphazard on high-backed, brocade-seated chairs, shutters left open all night, and the hallway ever in need of new paint.

Catherynne M. Valente / quote

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11c. 1979 AD

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.

Catherynne M. Valente / quote

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12c. 1979 AD

Where there is a Key, there is yet hope.

Catherynne M. Valente / quote

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13c. 1979 AD

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.

Catherynne M. Valente / quote

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14c. 1979 AD

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.

Catherynne M. Valente / quote

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15c. 1979 AD

Men die. It's practically what they're for.

Catherynne M. Valente / quote

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16c. 1979 AD

Death is not a checkmate…it is more like a carnival trick. You cannot win, no matter how you move your Queen.

Catherynne M. Valente / quote

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17c. 1979 AD

And as we watched, the Tsar of Death lifted up his eyelids like skirts and began to dance in the streets of Leningrad.

Catherynne M. Valente / quote

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18c. 1979 AD

If you are a monster, stand up.If you are a monster, a trickster, a fiend,If you’ve built a steam-powered wishing machineIf you have a secret, a dark past, a scheme,If you kidnap maidens or dabble in dreamsCome stand by me.If you have been broken, stand up.If you have been broken, abandoned, aloneIf you have been starving, a creature of boneIf you live in a tower, a dungeon, a throneIf you weep for wanting, to be held, to be known,Come stand by me.If you are a savage, stand up.If you are a witch, a dark queen, a black knight,If you are a mummer, a pixie, a sprite,If you are a pirate, a tomcat, a wright,If you swear by the moon and you fight the hard fight,Come stand by me. If you are a devil, stand up.If you are a villain, a madman, a beast,If you are a strowler, a prowler, a priest,If you are a dragon come sit at our feast,For we all have stripes, and we all have horns, We all have scales, tails, manes, claws and thornsAnd here in the dark is where new worlds are born.Come stand by me.

Catherynne M. Valente / quote

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19c. 1979 AD

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.

Catherynne M. Valente / quote

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20c. 1979 AD

All things are strange which are worth knowing.

Catherynne M. Valente / quote

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21c. 1979 AD

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.

Catherynne M. Valente / quote

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22c. 1979 AD

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.

Catherynne M. Valente / quote

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23c. 1979 AD

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.

Catherynne M. Valente / quote

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24c. 1979 AD

... 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.

Catherynne M. Valente / quote

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