But lost children always find each other, in the dark, in the cold. It is as though they are magnetized, and can only attract their like.
Catherynne M. ValenteBut 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 metโthe Yaichkan and the Leningrader and the chyerti maiden; the girl who saw the birds, and the girl who never didโthe 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.
Catherynne M. ValenteI 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.
Catherynne M. ValenteWe all live inside the terrible engine of authority, and it grinds and shrieks and burns so that no one will say: lines on maps are silly.
Catherynne M. Valente