Catherynne M. Valente
Everyone is a criminal! We are beset on all sides by antirevolutionary forces. Naturally, then, humans fall into three categories: the criminal, the not-yet-criminal, and the not-yet-caught.Collection: Fall
You look like a winter night", he had told her when he had given it to her. "I could sleep inside the cold of you".Collection: Sleep
War is not for winning, Masha," sighed Koschei, reading the tracks of supply lines, of pincer strategies, over her shoulder. "It is for surviving.Collection: War
It's Latin, which is an excellent language for mischief-making, which is why governments are so fond of it.Collection: Latin
We treat our stone wives with much more care than they treat their warm ones, anyway. I personally dust mine once a week, and I know Khaamil gives them presents when I am not looking. These are yours - they are in your care, and you must be faithful.Collection: Dust
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.Collection: Lying
Astolaine Bombast, catalogue woman, ordered up like a rare steak, 'plees make shore she is pritty and a whyt gurl if you have enny'.Well, she's pritty enough for homesteading but takes no ribbons at the fair. After three dead babies that fellow wanted his money back, pack her up in a box and ship her east to the wife factory.Collection: Baby
All jobs are odd, or they would be games or naps or picnics.Collection: Jobs
The great blessing and great cruelty of youth is that there seems to be time enough.Collection: Blessing
...her cry is a hook and it catches me in the throat.Collection: Hook
And as we watched, the Tsar of Death lifted up his eyelids like skirts and began to dance in the streets of Leningrad.Collection: Skirts
Monsters almost always are culture's way of working out their fears.Collection: Work Out
Your past's a private matter, sweetheart. You just keep it locked up in xbox where it can't hurt anyone.Collection: Hurt
You cannot escape where you come from, September. Some part of it remains inside you always, like the slender white heart in the center of the thickest onion.Collection: Heart
Her father’s shadow looked sadly down at her. “You can never forget what you do in a war, September my love. No one can. You won’t forget your war either.Collection: Father
September had never been betrayed before. She did not even know what to call the feeling in her chest, so bitter and sour. Poor child. There is always a first time, and it is never the last time.Collection: Children
Once more September marveled that even the Dodo knew what she wanted to be when she was grown. She simply could not think what she herself might do. September expected that destinies, which is how she thought of professions, simply landed upon one like a crown, and ever after no one questioned or fretted over it, being sure of one’s own use in the world. It was only that somehow her crown had not yet appeared. She did hope it would hurry up.Collection: Thinking
She felt as she often did in class when she was nearly sure she had the right answer, but could not always make herself raise her hand.Collection: Hands
Remember this when you are queen,” he whispered hoarsely. “I moved the earth and the water for you.Collection: Queens
The smell of loving is a difficult one to describe, but if you think of the times when someone has held you close and made you safe, you will remember how it smells just as well as I do.Collection: Thinking
For though, as we have said, all children are heartless, this is not precisely true of teenagers. Teenage hearts are raw and new, fast and fierce, and they do not know their own strength. Neither do they know reason or restraint, and if you want to know the truth, a goodly number of grown-up hearts never learn it.Collection: Teenage
I'm sure you've heard people talk about their Heart's Desire—well that's a load of rot. Hearts are idiots. They're big and squishy and full of daft dreams. They flounce off to write poetry and moon at folk who aren't worth the mooning. Bones are the ones that have to make the journey, fight the monster, kneel before whomever is big on kneeling these days. Bones do the work for the heart's grand plans. Bones know what you need. Hearts only know want.Collection: Dream
I've always had enough, even if my enough and your enough are as different as an elephant and a minaret.Collection: Elephants
September did not want to feel for the Marquess. That’s how villains get you, she knew. You feel badly for them, and next thing you know, you’re tied to train tracks. But her wild, untried heart opened up another bloom inside her, a dark branch heavy with fruit.Collection: Sympathy
I can't imagine a decent maze that would be caught dead without a minotaur. It's not done! You don't go out of your house without any clothes on, and a minotaur doesn't go into the world without a labyrinth to keep him warm.Collection: Clothes
You're not in love if you keep your own heart bricked up behind your bones. You're only playing.Collection: Heart
Men die. It's practically what they're for.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Heart
Maidens stand still, they are lovely statues and all admire them. Witches do not stand still. I was neither, but better that I err on the side of witchery, witchery that unlocks towers and empties ships.Collection: Lovely
Well enough. I won't ask you if your love is true or any of that rot—it's not my place to judge. After all, I'm a naked woman chained to a wall; I've no business questioning the lifestyles of wine-makers or anyone else.Collection: Wall
Someone ought to write a novel about me,” said Lebedeva loftily. “I shouldn’t care if they lied to make it more interesting, as long as they were good lies, full of kisses and daring escapes and the occasional act of barbarism. I can’t abide a poor liar.Collection: Lying
Chyerti—that’s us, demons and devils, small and big—are compulsive. We obsess. It’s our nature. We turn on a track, around and around; we march in step; we act out the same tales, over and over, the same sets of motions, while time piles up like yarn under a wheel. We like patterns. They’re comforting. Sometimes little things change—a car instead of a house, a girl not named Yelena. But it’s no different, not really. Not ever.Collection: Girl
Close up your head; your brain is getting loose.Collection: Brain
I perceive that you have a cruel heart, my child. It lies within your breast like a smoldering blade, hissing steam at me.Collection: Children
He tried to reconstruct the story in his mind, but it kept getting confused, bleeding into itself like watercolors.Collection: Confused
Then he is a monster!" the Prince crowed, "and I must slay him at once. The Formula works!" "Your Formula must result in a great deal of fighting," I mused. "Oh, yes, when applied correctly mighty and noble battles result! Of course I always win—the value of Prince X is a constant. It cannot be lesser than that of Monster Y—this is the Moral Superiority Hypothesis made famous five hundred years ago by my ancestor Ethelred, the Mathematician-King. We have never seen his equal, in all these centuries.Collection: Kings
You humans, you know, whoever built you sewed irony into your sinews.Collection: Irony
You know how we can be about things which sparkle and shine. We imagine they will put back something of what has been lost.Collection: Shining
Don’t worry,” Marya whispered, kissing his forehead. “My old bones will follow yours soon enough.Collection: Kissing
But the thought arrived inside her like a train: Marya Morevna, all in black, here and now, was a point at which all the women she had been met—the Yaichkan and the Leningrader and the chyerti maiden; the girl who saw the birds, and the girl who never did—the woman she was and the woman she might have been and the woman she would always be, forever intersecting and colliding, a thousand birds falling from a thousand oaks, over and over.Collection: Girl
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.Collection: Clever
No one is now what they were before the war. There’s just no getting any of it back.Collection: War
…everything has a narrative, really, and if you can’t understand a story and relate to it, figure out how you fit inside it, you’re not really alive at all.Collection: Stories
It appeals to the higher nature of the self to put aside food which once lived - I do not consider myself food, why should I ask all other creatures to consider themselves so?Collection: Self
True names,” said September wonderingly. “These are all true names. Like, when your parents call you to dinner and you don’t come and they call again but you still don’t come, and they call you by all your names together, and then, of course, you have to come, and right quick. Because true names have power, like Lye said. But I never told anyone my true name. The Green Wind told me not to. I didn’t understand what he meant, but I do now.Collection: Wind
Oh, quit that. Blushing is for virgins and Christians.Collection: Christian
At the snowy summit of all these things, however, is the fact that you simply cannot go about locking your siblings in towers when they misbehave. It is unseemly and betrays a sad lack of creativity.Collection: Sibling
One can never be sure,” the Green Wind sighed. “There is always the danger of kisses where sleeping maids are concerned. But you are safe now, and for awhile yet, and why worry about a thing that may never come to pass? Do not ruin today with mourning tomorrow.Collection: Sleep
Marya pinned out her childhood like a butterfly. She considered it the way a mathematician considers an equation.Collection: Butterfly