Tahu Mawar > Tahu's Quotes

“Oh, I will be cruel to you, Marya Morevna. It will stop your breath, how cruel I can be. But you understand, don’t you? You are clever enough. I am a demanding creature. I am selfish and cruel and extremely unreasonable. But I am your servant. When you starve I will feed you; when you are sick I will tend you. I crawl at your feet; for before your love, your kisses, I am debased. For you alone I will be weak.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“I am selfish. I am cruel. My mate cannot be less than I.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“Do you know, Masha, how revelation comes? Like death. So sudden, though you knew all along it must occur. A revelation is always the end of something. It might even be cause for grief.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“No, not like this, when I have not seen you without your skin on, when I know nothing, when I am not safe. Not you, whose name all my nightmares know.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“You will always fall in love, and it will always be like having your throat cut, just that fast.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“You are going to break your promise. I understand. And I hold my hands over the ears of my heart, so that I will not hate you.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“Koschei smiled. His pale lips sought hers, crushing her into a kiss like dying. She tasted sweetness there, as though he still kissed her with honey and sugar on his tongue. When he pulled away, his eyes shone.

"I don't care, Marya Morevna. Kiss him. Take him to your bed, and the vila, too, for all it matters to me. Do you understand me, wife? There need never be any rules between us. Let 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 beneath us. Let us steal and eat until we grow fat and roll in the pleasures of life, clutching each other for purchase. Only leave me my death — let me hold this one thing sacred and unmolested and secret — and I will serve you a meal myself, served on a platter of all the world's bounty. Only do not leave me, swear that you will never leave me, and no empress will stand higher. Forget the girls in the factory. Be selfish and cruel and think nothing of them. I am selfish. I am cruel. My mate cannot be less than I. I will have you in my hoard, Marya Morevna, my black mirror.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“I look at you, Masha, and it is like drinking cold water. I look at you and it is like my throat being cut.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“I will age for you, if it pleases you. I will match you, wrinkle for wrinkle, grey hair for grey hair, crease for crease, wrinkle for wrinkle. You will be so beautiful when you are old.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“Let 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, Deathless

“She said you’d come and I swore to eat your heart.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“After that, Marya Morevna understood that she belonged to her secret and it belonged to her. They had struck a bloody bargain between them. Keep me and obey me, the secret said to her, for I am your husband and I can destroy you.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“it is better to be strong and cruel than to be fair. At least, one eats better that way. And morality is more dependent on the state of one's stomach than of one's nation”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“Koschei the Deathless made a face as he tasted the wine. "It is far too sweet. Comrade Stalin fears bitterness and has the tastes of a spoiled princess. 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.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“I want to be myself again. I want to be six. I want to stop knowing everything I know.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“There is no such thing as a good wife or a good husband. Only ones who bide their time.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“everything living has a mouth. Mouths bite and swallow; they talk; they taste. They kiss. A mouth is the main tool for living.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“If I let him do this to me, what else will I allow? Anything, anything, anything.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“Life is like that. Death sweeps it away. That's what death is for. That's why they keep telling this story. It's the only story.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“I thought that for a long while, but you chose me, and then you chose him, and choosing is hard - one choice is never the end of the story.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“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. We look terrible to you, and severe, and you see our blood flying, but what we carry between us is hard-won, and we made it just as we wished it to be, just the color, just the shape.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“The thing about violence, see, is that the Empire has a lot more to lose than we do. Violence disrupts the extractive economy. You wreak havoc on one supply line, and there’s a dip in prices across the Atlantic. Their entire system of trade is high-strung and vulnerable to shocks because they’ve made it thus, because the rapacious greed of capitalism is punishing. It’s why slave revolts succeed. They can’t fire on their own source of labour – it’d be like killing their own golden geese.

‘But if the system is so fragile, why do we so easily accept the colonial situation? Why do we think it’s inevitable? Why doesn’t Man Friday ever get himself a rifle, or slit Robinson Crusoe’s neck in the night? The problem is that we’re always living like we’ve lost. We’re all living like you. We see their guns, their silver-work, and their ships, and we think it’s already over for us. We don’t stop to consider how even the playing field actually might be. And we never consider what things would look like if we took the gun.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Power did not lie in the tip of a pen. Power did not work against its own interests. Power could only be brought to heel by acts of defiance it could not ignore. With brute, unflinching force. With violence.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel