The Folded World Quotes

“I hope, in years to come, I shall hold my heart up and it will be a pane of clear glass, through which I see all, but nothing is distorted.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Folded World

“How much better if life were more like books, if life lied a little more, and gave up its stubborn and boring adherence to the way things can be, and thought a little more imaginatively about the way things might be.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Folded World

“One of the many quotes on love..."Love can come only with time and sentience. We learn it as we learn language--and some never learn it well. Love is like a tool, though it is not a tool; something strange and wonderful to use, difficult to master, and mysterious in its provenance.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Folded World

“The world is not made of countries and outsiders. We are all just humans, and most of us fools and all of us longing for more than we have, to know more than we know--and yet even that is not enough, for if we knew everything we would only be disappointed that there was not one more secret to uncover.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Folded World

“God is a random event, a nexus of pain and pleasure and making and breaking.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Folded World

“For the world has chosen and it says: make me whole. Think of us as a kind of haggard Calypso, offering everything, asking the world to choose anew. But it’s a lie, really. There is only one choice and it is always the same. Only in Pentexore was any other ever possible. The world always says: I choose to wither and die if it means love and tapestries and sons and suitors, if it means stories and wars and a thousand ships launching. And we only give the world what it wants.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Folded World

“God is another way of talking about the power to break things, that's all. When you mean to break a goblet or a bone, well, just do it and be done. But when the things to be broken get big enough you have to start talking about God.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Folded World

“In future days you will call John Mandeville a liar, and my shade will laugh at you and say: true, true, I was, but not always, not so. When the world was good enough in my sight, when it behaved as wildly and gorgeously as I always knew it could, I told the truth of it.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Folded World

“I asked a queen once why she didn’t want me. She wasn’t a powerful queen, not a monarch of Spain or of Albania. Just a little kingdom of nowhere, but she married well and she had a crown. The queen of nowhere looked at me with her clear grey eyes and said: “Because I don’t want to be in a story.” Princesses usually grow up to be queens. The cleverness sticks long after the beauty goes.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Folded World

“Oh, please, do try to explain it to them. We’ll be here for ninety years, and at the end of it they’ll be quite certain you’ve told them that Mohammed is a turtle with an excellent singing voice. May you have better luck than I!”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Folded World

“Do you understand Christ to be more like an ox (excuse us, three oxen) or more like a door?”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Folded World

“The opposite of Calypso is apocalypse.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Folded World

“Love is a practice. It is a yogic stance; it is lying upon nails; it is walking over coals, or water. It comes naturally to no one, though that is a great secret. One who is learned might say: does not a babe in her mother’s arms love? From her first breath does she not know how to love as surely as her mouth can find the breast? And I would respond: have you ever met a child? A cub may find the breast but not latch upon it, she may bite her mother, or become sick with her milk. So too, the utter dependence of a tiny and helpless thing upon those who feed and warm her is not love. It is fierce and needful; it has a power all its own and that power is terrible, but it is not love. Love can come only with time and sentience. We learn it as we learn language—and some never learn it well. Love is like a tool, though it is not a tool; something strange and wonderful to use, difficult to master, and mysterious in its provenance.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Folded World

“For all that they love to make kings, John’s folk seem to have little interest in the actual business of ruling anything. They like to become, they do not like to be.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Folded World

“He rested his hand on mine, once or twice. He kissed my brow, one time, in the late evening when the stars were full as moons, and I had brought him both a jug of wine and a treatise on transfiguration he had been asking for all over town, and I felt it on my head like a pain. But love is like that, it is hard and awful and, usually, it is not contagious.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Folded World