Catherynne M. Valente

“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.”

“... 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.”

“Maybe [Snow White] never wakes up. More likely than anything else, really. You can’t kiss a girl into anything.”

“Eternity takes forever. The infinite expanse of time just does not know when to quit.”

“Time is communal, Marya Morevna, the most purely communal of all commodities. It belongs to us all equally.”

“All things are strange which are worth knowing.”

“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.”

“I have all the books I could need, and what more could I need than books?”

“One: A Book Is A Universe and the Universe is a Book. Inside a book, any Physiks or Magical Laws or Manners or Histories may hold sway. A book is its own universe and while in it, you must p...”

“Wouldn't you like to have comrades?' But she would not like that. She wanted only to rest and to read her old, rain-swollen books, turning the pages carefully, so carefully.”

“You can't have whatever you want. But to a child who must ask permission for every single thing, adulthood looks like a constant parade of every desire's satisfaction. It is a heady and terr...”

“It seems like every few years a big name author will holler something about how evil, heinous, and morally wrong fan fiction and fan fiction writers are, and then the Internet gets all upset...”

“I'm very touchy feely with my fandom, in part because they've never done me wrong or hurt me in any way. This is an awesome balance. I hope it stays that way forever.”

“Just about every science whiz can tell you how he or she took apart the TV or the radio when they were kids just to see how it worked. To see what the world was made of. Well, when I was a k...”