Melancholy of Mechagirl Quotes

“Everything is always happening all at once, in the present tense, forever, the beginning and the end and the denouement and the remaindering.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Melancholy of Mechagirl

“Robots are like Mars: they need
girls.
Boys won't do;
the memesoup is all wrong. They stomp
when they should kiss
and they're none too keen
on having things shoved inside them...

It's not a robot
until you put a girl inside. Sometimes
I feel like that.
A junkyard
the Company forgot to put a girl in.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Melancholy of Mechagirl

“Memory is like that. It alters itself so that girls
are always trapped under the earth, waiting in the dark.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Melancholy of Mechagirl

“She wasn’t angry. You can’t get angry just because the world’s so much bigger than you and you’re stuck in it.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Melancholy of Mechagirl

“Everything looks like magic when you don’t understand it.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Melancholy of Mechagirl

“So you don’t love him. Why would you look for
love with a man? How could a man ever understand you?”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Melancholy of Mechagirl

“The science fiction writer cuts out her heart. It is a thousand hearts. It is all the hearts she will ever have. It is her only child’s dead heart. It is the heart of herself when she is old and nothing she ever wrote can be revised again. It is a heart that says with its wet beating mouth: Time is the same thing as light. Both arrive long after they began, bearing sad messages. How lovely you are. I love you.
  The science fiction writer steals her heart from herself to bring it into the light. She escapes her old heart through a smoke hole and becomes a self-referencing system of imperfect, but elegant, memory. She sews up her heart into her own leg and gives birth to it twenty years later on the long highway to Ohio. The heat of herself dividing echoes forward and back, and she accretes, bursts, and begins again the long process of her own super-compression until her heart is an egg containing everything. She eats of her heart and knows she is naked. She throws her heart into the abyss and it falls a long way, winking like a red star.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Melancholy of Mechagirl

“When you, sweet sleeper, wake in the morning, one arm thrown over your golden-sticky eyes, sheets a-mangle, your dreams still flit through you, ragged, full of holes. You can remember the man with the yellow eyes, but not why he chased you. You can remember the hawk footed woman on your roof, but not what she whispered.
That is my fault. I could not help it. I tromped though you in the night and ate up your dreams, a moth through wool. I didn't want them all, only the sweetest veins, like fat marbling a slab of ruby meat, the marrowy slick of what she whispered, why he ran.
I am a rowling thing--my snout raises up toward the moon to catch the scent of your sweat. I show my flat teeth to the night wind. I beg permission of your bed clothes to curl up in the curve of your stomach, to gnaw on your shoulders, your breasts, your eyelids. I must open up a hole in you, to crawl through to the red place where your dreams spool out.
You put your arm around me in the night. Do you remember? My belly was taut and black, a tapir's belly, a tapir's snout snuffling for your breath as a pig for truffles. You were my truffle, my thick, earthy mushroom. You were delicious, and I thank you for my supper.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Melancholy of Mechagirl

“Ohio is historically a healthy place for science fiction writers”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Melancholy of Mechagirl

“She is sad. She does not speak Japanese. Her husband went to the desert months and months ago. Every day she goes to the market and brings back chocolate, a peach, and a salmon rice-ball for her dinner. She sits and eats and stares at the wall. Sometimes she watches television. Sometimes she walks three miles to Blue Street to look at necklaces in the window that she wishes someone would buy for her. Sometimes she walks along the pier to see the sunken bicycles, pinged into ruin by invisible arrows of battleship-sonar, crusted over with rust and coral. She likes to pet people’s dogs as they walk them. That is her whole life. What should she dream of?”
  “Something better.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Melancholy of Mechagirl

“I am sustained by the thing that violates my heart and breaks the peaceful dark of my mind.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Melancholy of Mechagirl

“God sighed, for all physical processes are reversible in theory—but not in practice.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Melancholy of Mechagirl

“Draw the world the way you want it. Draw it and it will be.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Melancholy of Mechagirl

“It’s just a job.
Why do boys have to make everything
sound weird? It’s not a robot
until you put a girl inside. Sometimes
         I feel like that.
         A junkyard
         the Company forgot to put a girl in.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Melancholy of Mechagirl

“It was only a dream. Sometimes they say that, at the end of stories, in the land where Milo was born. And then I woke up—it was only a dream.
  Stories here do not end like that. I cannot wake up. I do not sleep.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Melancholy of Mechagirl