Morgue > Morgue's Quotes

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
― Stephen King

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
― Saul Bellow

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”
― E.L. Doctorow

“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
― Anton Chekhov

“You know how we can be about things which sparkle and shine. We imagine they will put back something of what has been lost.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, In the Night Garden

“Stories,' the green-eyed Sigrid said, unperturbed, 'are like prayers. It does not matter when you begin, or when you end, only that you bend a knee and say the words.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, In the Night Garden

“I will write in words of fire.
I will write them on your skin.
I will write about desire.
Write beginnings, write of sin.
You’re the book I love the best,
your skin only holds my truth,
you will be a palimpsest
lines of age rewriting youth.
You will not burn upon the pyre.
Or be buried on the shelf.
You’re my letter to desire:
And you’ll never read yourself.
I will trace each word and comma
As the final dusk descends,
You’re my tale of dreams and drama,
Let us find out how it ends.”
― Neil Gaiman

“If you are a monster, stand up.
If you are a monster, a trickster, a fiend,
If you’ve built a steam-powered wishing machine
If you have a secret, a dark past, a scheme,
If you kidnap maidens or dabble in dreams
Come stand by me.

If you have been broken, stand up.
If you have been broken, abandoned, alone
If you have been starving, a creature of bone
If you live in a tower, a dungeon, a throne
If 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 thorns
And here in the dark is where new worlds are born.
Come stand by me.”
― Catherynne M. Valente

“We all have someone we think shines so much more than we do that we are not even a moon to their sun, but a dead little rock floating in space next to their gold and their blaze.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, In the Night Garden

“Funny how "question" contains the word "quest" inside it, as though any small question asked is a journey through briars.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Under in the Mere

“...For grace may only be found briefly, and always in the midst of madness.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest

“He missed you
like a fish in a bowl
misses the open sea.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

“All things are strange which are worth knowing.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, In the Cities of Coin and Spice

“I reminded myself: when a book lies unopened it might contain anything in the world, anything imaginable. It therefore, in that pregnant moment before opening, contains everything. Every possibility, both perfect and putrid. Surely such mysteries are the most enticing things You grant us in this mortal mere -- the fruit in the garden, too, was like this. Unknown, and therefore infinite. Eve and her mate swallowed eternity, every possible thing, and made the world between them.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Habitation of the Blessed

“She was beautiful and terrifying, savage and pure.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, In the Night Garden

“I said: I could be a wolf for you. I could put my teeth on your throat. I could growl. I could eat you whole. I could wait for you in the dark. I could howl against your hair.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Bread We Eat in Dreams

“I burn, I freeze; I am never warm. I am rigid; I forgot softness because it did not serve me.”
― Catherynne M. Valente

“Love is hungry and severe. Love is not unselfish or bashful or servile or gentle. Love demands everything. Love is not serene, and it keeps no records. Love sometimes gives up, loses faith, even hope, and it cannot endure everything. Love, sometimes, ends. But its memory lasts forever, and forever it may come again. Love is not a mountain, it is a wheel. No harsher praxis exists in this world. There are three things that will beggar the heart and make it crawl - faith, hope and love - and the cruelest of these is love.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Habitation of the Blessed

“... 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, Palimpsest

“There is always a moment when stories end, a moment when everything is blue and black and silent, and the teller does not want to believe it is over, and the listener does not, and so they both hold their breath and hope fervently as pilgrims that it is not over, that there are more tales to come, more and more, fitted together like a long chain coiled in the hand. They hold their breath; the trees hold theirs, the air and the ice and the wood and the Gate. But no breath can be held forever, and all tales end.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, In the Cities of Coin and Spice

“Trouble is, most times, when you go looking to sell your soul, nobody's buying.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“This is my heart—carry it with you. I will dream of you in the dark, and you will taste it in my tea, and feel it in my shoes.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, In the Cities of Coin and Spice

“The worst thing in the world is having to go back to the dark you shook off.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White

“Anything is a poem if you say it often enough.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“It's not so bad, my darling. Being dead. It's like being alive, only colder.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“You will live as you live in any world...With difficulty, and grief.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“I perceive that you have a cruel heart, my child. It lies within your breast like a smoldering blade, hissing steam at me.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, In the Night Garden