Catherynne M. Valente Quotes

You can’t stop people being assholes. They do love it so. The best you can hope for is that some people, sometimes, will turn out to be somewhat less than the absolute worst. When they manage to trip and fall over that incredibly low bar, they’ll make you want to end it all. But when they leap over it, they’ll make you believe this whole mess really was created for a reason—the bastards. Except me, of course. I’m superb. Ask anyone. And you’re all right, I suppose. Welcome to being a people, kid. It’s just dreadful up here.

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

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

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

Life is beautiful and life is stupid. This is, in fact, widely regarded as a universal rule not less inviolable than the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Uncertainty Principle, and No Post on Sundays.

Are you kind enough, on your little planet, not to shut that rhythm down? Not to crush underfoot the singers of songs and tellers of tales and wearers of silk? Because it’s monsters who do that. Who extinguish art. Who burn books. Who ban music. Who yell at anyone with ears to turn off that racket. Who cannot see outside themselves clearly enough to sing their truth to the heavens. Do you have enough goodness in your world to let the music play?
Do you have soul?

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

And then she’d take off again, with a sort of confused-confounded glance down at me, as though every time she came home, it was a shock to remember that I’d ever been born.

A cow goes moo; a sheep goes baa; a celebrity correspondent goes who are you wearing?

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.

“And how does that make you feel?” he crooned in the comforting tone of a therapist who may or may not actually care.

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.

Sex is universal, it’s just not evenly distributed.

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.