I want to keep on living forever and watching heroes and fools and knights go up and down, into the world and out. I want to keep being myself and mind the work that minds me. Work is not always a hard thing that looms over your years. Sometimes, work is the gift of the world to the wanting.
Catherynne M. ValenteFairy tales have always been about getting through the worst of everything, the darkest and the deepest and the bloodiest of events. They are about surviving, and what you look like when you emerge from the trial. The reason we keep telling fairy tales over and over, that we need to keep telling them, is that the trials change. So the stories change too, and the heroines and villains and magical objects, to keep them true. Fairy tales are the closets where the world keeps its skeletons.
Catherynne M. ValenteThere is no such thing as a people who are all wicked or even all good. Everyone chooses. But even they, even they looked at people and saw only tools. No one is a cup for another to drink from.
Catherynne M. ValenteMagic does that. It wastes you away. Once it grips you by the ear, the real world gets quieter and quieter, until you can hardly hear it at all.
Catherynne M. ValenteHats change everything. September knew this with all her being, deep in the place where she knew her own name, and that her mother would still love her even though she hadnโt waved goodbye. For one day her father had put on a hat with golden things on it and suddenly he hadnโt been her father anymore, he had been a soldier, and he had left. Hats have power. Hats can change you into someone else.
Catherynne M. ValenteThe old order, it is good for the old. A farmer wants his son to be afraid of beautiful women, so that he will not leave home too soon, so he tells a story about how one drowned his brotherโs cousinโs friend in a lake, not because he was a pig who deserved to be drowned, but because beautiful women are bad, and also witches. And it doesnโt matter that she didnโt ask to be beautiful, or to be born in a lake, or to live forever, or to not know how men breathe until they stop doing it.
Catherynne M. Valente