Catherynne M. Valente Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. Hats have power. Hats can change you into someone else. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

2. However unlikely it may seem, it is the truth and, therefore, one hundred percent likely. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

3. I know you loved both he and I, the way a mother can love two sons. And no one should be judged for loving more than they ought, only for loving not enough. Deathless

4. I'm not lost, because I haven't any idea where to go that I might get lost on the way to. I'd like to get lost, because then I'd know where I was going, you see. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

5. Just remember that the only question in a house is who is to rule. The rest is only dancing around that, trying not to look it in the eye. Deathless

6. Many people in this room have an Etsy store where they create unique, unreplicable artifacts or useful items to be sold on a small scale, in a common marketplace where their friends meet and barter. I and many of my friends own more than one spinning wheel. We grow our food again. We make pickles and jams on private, individual scales, when many of our mothers forgot those skills if they ever knew them. We come to conventions, we create small communities of support and distributed skills--when one of us needs help, our village steps in. It’s only that our village is no longer physical, but connected by DSL instead of roads. But look at how we organize our tribes--bloggers preside over large estates, kings and queens whose spouses’ virtues are oft-lauded but whose faces are rarely seen. They have moderators to protect them, to be their knights, a nobility of active commenters and big name fans, a peasantry of regular readers, and vandals starting the occasional flame war just to watch the fields burn. Other villages are more commune-like, sharing out resources on forums or aggregate sites, providing wise women to be consulted, rabbis or priests to explain the world, makers and smiths to fashion magical objects. Groups of performers, acrobats and actors and singers of songs are traveling the roads once more, entertaining for a brief evening in a living room or a wheatfield, known by word of mouth and secret signal. Separate from official government, we create our own hierarchies, laws, and mores, as well as our own folklore and secret history. Even my own guilt about having failed as an academic is quite the crisis of filial piety--you see, my mother is a professor. I have not carried on the family trade.We dwell within a system so large and widespread, so disorganized and unconcerned for anyone but its most privileged and luxurious members, that our powerlessness, when we can summon up the courage to actually face it, is staggering. So we do not face it. We tell ourselves we are Achilles when we have much more in common with the cathedral-worker, laboring anonymously so that the next generation can see some incremental progress. We lack, of course, a Great Work to point to and say: my grandmother made that window; I worked upon the door. Though, I would submit that perhaps the Internet, as an object, as an aggregate entity, is the cathedral we build word by word and image by image, window by window and portal by portal, to stand taller for our children, if only by a little, than it does for us. For most of us are Lancelots, not Galahads. We may see the Grail of a good Classical life, but never touch it. That is for our sons, or their daughters, or further off.And if our villages are online, the real world becomes that dark wood on the edge of civilization, a place of danger and experience, of magic and blood, a place to make one’s name or find death by bear. And here, there be monsters.

7. Stories have a way of changing faces. They are unruly things, undisciplined, given to delinquency and the throwing of erasers. This is why we must close them up into thick, solid books, so they cannot get out and cause trouble. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

8. This is what comes of having a heart, even a very small and young one. It causes no end of trouble, and that’s the truth. The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There

9. You should always listen to minotaurs. Anybody with four stomachs has to have a firm grip on reality. The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

10. ... relationships required such vigilance, such attention. You had to hold them together by force of will, and other people took up so much space, demanded so much time. It was exhausting. Palimpsest

11. All things are strange which are worth knowing. In the Cities of Coin and Spice

12. Do not ruin today with mourning tomorrow. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

13. First, the avid student must be aware that when the world was young it knew only seven things: water, life and death, salt, night, birds and the length of an hour. Deathless

14. Hearts set about finding other hearts the moment they are born, and between them, they weave nets so frightfully strong and tight that you end up bound forever in hopeless knots, even to the shadow of a beast you knew and loved long ago. The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There

15. It is harder, usually, to find a person who wants to walk the streets of me, to taste the teas of my country, to... immigrate, you could say. Palimpsest

16. Just remember that the only question in a house is who is to rule. The rest is only dancing around that, trying not to look it in the eye. Deathless

17. Oh, September. My best girl. I shall tell you an awful, wonderful, unhappy, joyful secret: It is like that for everyone. One day you wake up and you are grown. And on the inside, you are no older than the last time you thought Wouldn't it be lovely to be all Grown-Up right this second? The Boy Who Lost Fairyland

18. Robots are like Mars: they needgirls. Boys won't do;the memesoup is all wrong. They stompwhen they should kissand they're none too keenon having things shoved inside them...It's not a robotuntil you put a girl inside. Sometimes I feel like that. A junkyard the Company forgot to put a girl in. The Melancholy of Mechagirl

19. Still, she was not sorry. If the world is divided into seeing and not seeing, Marya thought, I shall always choose to see. Deathless

20. The kind of hope I have doesn’t begin and end with demanding everything go back to the way it was when it can’t, it can’t ever, that’s not how time works. The Past Is Red

21. To 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. Palimpsest

22. Where there is a Key, there is yet hope. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making