quotes by Catherynne M. Valente

"... I did not set out to be beloved and just, only strong."

'A King can be better than that," the Prince insisted.

"And so we all begin, determined to better our fathers' performances, knowing we can change the very nature of humanity, make it better, cleaner. But then daggers strike in the night, and peasants revolt, and all manner of atrocities become a necessity as breakfast. Only Princes believe in the greater good. Kings know there is only Reign, and all things may be committed in its holy name..."
— Catherynne M. Valente

"...what maiden knows how the world is skewed to spare any testing of her virtue?"
— Catherynne M. Valente (In the Cities of Coin and Spice)

"We are a Body of contradiction, flesh-full and fleshless."
— Catherynne M. Valente (The Labyrinth)

"We all live inside the terrible engine of authority, and it grinds and shrieks and burns so that no one will say: lines on maps are silly."
— Catherynne M. Valente (The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making)

"..what came before has dissolved from me, lost like milk teeth. But I think, rather, that it has always been as it is, and there was never a beforethis nor will there be an afternow. I am accepting. This is not a thing to be solved, or conquered, or destroyed. It is. I am. We are. We conjugate together in darkness, plotting against each other, the Labyrinth to eat me and I to eat it, each to swallow the hard, black opium of the other. We hold orange petals beneath our tongues and seethe. It has always been so. It grinds against me and I bite into its skin.."
— Catherynne M. Valente (The Labyrinth)

""Most of them... most of us never figure it out. Bad dream, they think, or good one. Funny rash, never really goes away, but Doc says it's fine, nothing to worry about. Why dwell on it? But some people, they just can't let it go... Some people drink themselves out of school trying to find it again, trolling through bars where the shadows are so greasy they leave trails on the walls, just to find a way in, a way through. Some people forget too that you're supposed to stop sleeping, you're supposed to have a life in the sun.""
— Catherynne M. Valente (Palimpsest)