Catherynne M. Valente Quotes

They are time, and time eats everything but listens to no one.

My percussionist thinks you have a touch of Metastasized Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Blek. My diagnosis? You’re an asshole. Sadly, the only known cure is being set on fire and dropped off a balcony.

What was magical at two in the morning was tawdry and cheap and dangerous to your health at two in the afternoon.

The universe is a very large and very complicated demonstration of having one’s cake and eating it too. It sees no reason not to have it all.

Dying happens to everyone, even stars. Even the stuff between the stars. But if you believe in yourself and achieve your goals, you can die so hard that no one will ever forget you, and that’s almost as good as not dying at all. Well, it isn’t, really, it isn’t at all, and believing and achieving is just something sportscasters say, but what are you gonna do, not die? Try it. I’ll wait.

He’d only said what he meant, which was, when you thought about it, a minor superpower, because so few people ever did.

Everybody fucks.…Being ashamed of it makes about as much sense as being ashamed of the speed of light.

Everyone’s always saying love is the element that binds the universe together, but that’s a load of bollocks; it’s convenience.

But in the end, all wars are more or less the same. If you dig down through the layers of caramel corn and peanuts and choking, burning death, you’ll find the prize at the bottom and the prize is a question and the question is this: Which of us are people and which of us are meat?

Failure was here before you and she’ll be here after you and she won’t even notice you go.

People are mostly happiest when they think they’re just about to get the thing they want most.
Before and after, they’re all monsters.

I don’t know why you would even bring up the Internet. The xeno-intelligence officer responsible for evaluating your digital communication required invasive emergency therapy after an hour’s exposure. One glance at that thing is the strongest argument possible against the sentience of humanity. I wouldn’t draw attention to it, if I were you.

Oh, certainly it had been alarming at first. But adjusting to certain changes in your circumstances was easy when you didn’t really care about anything. As far as she was concerned, she’d always talked. By some miracle, everyone else had recently achieved the ability to listen properly. She was over the novelty within half an hour. No one listened to her or asked for her input or attended gratefully to her needs any more than they ever had. They were too busy making big monkey fusses over their big monkey problems.

I felt like I was the only one who understood that the only wall we could ever build against What’s Going On was the glitter and the shine and the synth and the knowing grin that never stops knowing. The show. Because the opposite of fascism isn’t anarchy, it’s theater. When the world is fucked, you go to the theater, you go to the shine, and when the bad men come, all there is left to do is sing them down.

Though any species on any dumb gobworld may develop sentience (the poor bastards), no government ever does.