Wishes of one's old life wither and shrivel like old leaves if they are not replaced with new wishes when the world changes. And the world always changes. Wishes get slimy, and their colors fade, and soon they are just mud, like all the rest of the mud, and not wishes at all, but regrets. The trouble is, not everyone can tell when they ought to launder their wishes. Even when one finds oneself in Fairyland and not at home at all, it is not always so easy to remember to catch the world in it's changing and change with it.
Catherynne M. ValenteWe like the wrong sorts of girls, they wrote. They are usually the ones worth writing about.
Catherynne M. ValenteShe who invented words, and yet does not speak; she who brings dreams and visions, yet does not sleep; she who swallows the storm, yet knows nothing of rain or wind. I speak for her; I am her own.
Catherynne M. ValenteTo touch a person...to sleep with a person...is to become a pioneer," she whispered then, "a frontiersman at the edge of their private world, the strange, incomprehensible world of their interior, filled with customs you could never imitate, a language which sounds like your own but is really totally foreign, knowable only to them.
Catherynne M. ValenteYou should always listen to minotaurs. Anybody with four stomachs has to have a firm grip on reality.
Catherynne M. ValenteChyertiโthatโs us, demons and devils, small and bigโare compulsive. We obsess. Itโs 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. Theyโre comforting. Sometimes little things changeโa car instead of a house, a girl not named Yelena. But itโs no different, not really. Not ever.
Catherynne M. Valente