Speak Easy Quotes

“She's got a man's nightshirt on and stockings with holes in them. Somebody else's tie, a gold and green chevroned number, hangs around her neck and just at this moment it looks like a king's mantle draped over her shoulders. Her hair's all loose, her lipstick and eyeliner gone a-roving. She's got a cigar in one hand and a jar full of gin in the other, and she's laughing, laughing like for once that damned chicken crossed the road for something really good.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Speak Easy

“And honey, everybody eats art and drinks stories. It's the best drunk there is!”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Speak Easy

“Funniest thing about love, how it shakes loose when no one's looking. How the dark helps it along. Maybe that's why we dug caves so much, way back when.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Speak Easy

“She drank like a Czar and sang like a broken squeezebox and danced like the Sugarplum Fairy cutting loose at last”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Speak Easy

“Some kinds of hurt almost feel good, you know? Familiar. Like an ugly couch in your parents' house with the springs all bare where your daddy slapped you once for coming home late and now when you sleep on it it's like one of those Indian fellas napping on nails but it makes you feel like you come from somewhere. Hurts like home.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Speak Easy

“And Miss Oleander Coy had herself a blue mouth. Little stains at the edges of her raspberry lips where she put her pen when she was thinking, which was always.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Speak Easy

“Zelda was winter's best dame: pale and dark with a shimmer of Christmas in her eye, a flash of New Year's in her laugh.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Speak Easy

“Nobody came without their sequins roaring.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Speak Easy

“You always trade blood for joy. It’s always a deal struck in the wet and the dark. Al didn’t make the rules. He just dances to the song that’s playing.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Speak Easy

“Talking to Zelda felt like talking to a radio. It talked back, but you couldn’t call it a conversation.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Speak Easy

“It was not going Frankie's way. Talking to Zelda felt like talking to a radio. It talked back, but you couldn't call it a conversation.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Speak Easy

“Try your breath on the bones of everything that has them, remember the best songs and figure out how to write them down so when somebody's blowing on your bones, the songs keep on.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Speak Easy

“Girls laugh. Their hair giggles down their back.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Speak Easy

“It's a law, a law of the universe. Like gravity or stupidity or how a minor chord always sounds sad.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Speak Easy

“My Daddy always said a lady's gotta sit still and hush her mouth except for please and thank you and you don't say. But it's not fair to do that to a girl. Talking is the most fun you can have. Clothes on, clothes off, it's everything in the world.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Speak Easy

“Olli punched in with the cymbal-whack of her typewriter by the alley-side window while a happy neon sign six stories down flashing Hobart and Sons' Fine Smokables got its purple light all tangled up in her eyelashes.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Speak Easy

“If Eve went door to door with her apple, not a soul in the Artemisia wouldn't have grabbed it, planted a kiss on old Mama Fig Leaf, and had that shiny red temptation turned into the applejack of good and evil within an hour.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Speak Easy

“And when funny things happen, you just have to go along, don't you? Because they might never happen again and you'll have missed the joke of it, missed the fun, and then when you're old and your kittens ask you what you did when the world had its glad rags on, you won't have nothing to say, will you?”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Speak Easy

“Ragtime plinking, glasses clinking, choruses getting sung with only half the lyrics right, giggles bubbling over like a tower of champagne.

It's a party, shaking down the dawn.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Speak Easy

“Sell your soul and half your shoes for a glass of gin.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Speak Easy

“His parties have room for all. Come on in. Nobody to look at you funny in here. Nobody to tell you not to have that drink, kiss that fella, smash that chair, light that chandelier on fire. Do it all. Do it all forever.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Speak Easy

“The light is the color of brandy seeping. It has a taste. Your skin tastes it, like you're all over tongues. The taste is sugar-cane, slowly rotting, turning into the great god rum. It's always that magic hour those film-boys love to shoot down here. Always gold.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Speak Easy

“Al kept it coming and nobody asked how and his only rule was: share. Be warm, be innocent, open your everything, speak easy. Share”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Speak Easy

“People are clocks who think they wind themselves.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Speak Easy

“I'm gonna be good at something other than marrying, darlings. Besides, I don't want them. I don't even wanna screw them, how am I gonna marry them?”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Speak Easy

“Al is the upside down man. Back home, you work all day and night to learn how to paint, learn linseed and cadmium and badger-hair and perspective, which is just math in art-school drag, you know? And maybe you still can't do anything worth phoning the Met over. But hey, getting a boy to fuck you is just the easiest thing since Sunday naps. Up top, getting drunk at a party is what you do when you're all out of art. But in...Canada? Are we calling it Canada now? Ok! Al's the King of Canada and he says: fuck that for a lark! The world feels like being a bastard-and-a-half this decade, let's play nine-pins on its grave. Down here it's all the same! Kiss a boy and books come out! Ralph up Parthenons into the upstairs toilet! Dance poems, shit showtunes! Art is easy! Pick up genius at the corner shop! Sell your soul and half your shoes for a glass of gin!' He looks up at Zelda Fair and his poor goblin face goes all twisted up and desperate. 'It's all fucked anyway, you see? The end of the world already happened. It's happening all the time. It's gonna happen again. And again after that. Just when you think it's done falling on its face, the world picks itself up and throws itself off a roof. Boom. Pavement. The world's ending forever and ever and we're not even allowed to toast at her funeral. So we gotta do something else or she won't know we ever loved her.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Speak Easy