Deathless

by Catherynne M. Valente

That everyone already knows this, and it is only unusual to me. Or else only I saw it happen, and no one else knows that the world is like that.

There is no better teacher of rough necessity than bad luck,

morality is more dependent on the state of one’s stomach than of one’s nation.”

I savor bitterness—it is born of experience. It is the privilege of one who has truly lived. You, too, must learn to prefer it. After all, when all else is gone, you may still have bitterness in abundance.”

However, Life and Death are brothers, and their ambition is precisely equal.

Soon folk of the city requisitioned the grain of the villages, and stored it up in great vaults, and argued over its distribution while it moldered, and wrote long books on the righteousness of this,

Histories are instruments of oppression.

It is alive in some sense, but you wouldn’t set it a place at dinner.

“God doesn’t exist only so long as devils also don’t exist,”

A marriage is a private thing. It has its own wild laws, and secret histories, and savage acts, and what passes between married people is incomprehensible to outsiders.

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.

Miserable means miserable. What can you do? You live through it, or you die. Living is best, but if you can’t live, well, life is like that, sometimes.

what is the world but a boxing ring where fools and devils put up their fists?

In both marriage and war you must cut up the things people say like a cake, and eat only what you can stomach,

The labyrinth is, after all, a devil’s trick. Devils know only good tricks.

No one is now what they were before the war.

And no one should be judged for loving more than they ought, only for loving not enough, which was my crime.