In both marriage and war you must cut up the things people say like a cake and eat only what you can stomach.
Catherynne M. ValenteYou're not in love if you keep your own heart bricked up behind your bones. You're only playing.
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. ValenteYou only had to choose which me to talk to, for, you know, we all change our manners, depending on who has come to chat. One doesnโt behave at all the same way to a grandfather as to a bosom friend, to a professor as to a curious niece.
Catherynne M. ValenteAt 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.
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. Valente