{"author":"Catherynne M. Valente","author_id":"Catherynne+M.+Valente","total_quotes":270,"quotes":[{"text":"I am a practical girl, and a life is only so long. It should be spent in as much peace and good eating and good reading as possible and no undue excitement. That is all I am after.","author":"Catherynne M. Valente","tags":["books","food","happiness","life","reading"],"id":1528,"author_id":"Catherynne+M.+Valente"},{"text":"History is a funny little creature. Do you remember visiting your old Aunt that autumn when the trees shone so very yellow, and how she owned a striped and unsocial cat, quite old and fat and wounded about the ears and whiskers, with a crooked, broken tail? That cat would not come to you no matter how you coaxed and called; it had its own business, thank you, and no time for you. But as the evening wore on, it would come and show some affection or favor to your Aunt, or your Father, or the old end-table with the stack of green coasters on it. You couldn’t predict who that cat might decide to love, or who it might decide to bite. You couldn’t tell what it thought or felt, or how old it might really be, or whether it would one day, miraculously, decide to let you put one hand, very briefly, on its dusty head.History is like that.Of course, unlike your Aunt’s cat, history is going on all around you, all the time, and is often quite lively. Sometimes it rests in a sunbeam for a peaceful century or two, but on the whole, history is always plotting, and it bites very hard. It stalks around the world, fickle and dissatisfied and often angry. It demands to be fed just a little earlier each day, until you find yourself carving meat from the bone as fast as you can, faster than you thought possible, just to satisfy it. Some people have a kind of marvelous talent for calming it and enticing it onto their laps. To some it will never even spare a glance.","author":"Catherynne M. Valente","tags":["history","stories"],"id":3121,"author_id":"Catherynne+M.+Valente"},{"text":"Did you never wonder why the old books are so full of dragons chasing after maidens? The serpents think the girls are orphans, and long to get them away in a lair so that they may grow up strong and tall.","author":"Catherynne M. Valente","tags":["dragons","girls","growing-up","women"],"id":3422,"author_id":"Catherynne+M.+Valente"},{"text":"Let me tell you something, kid,' said Mrs. H of Boston and Beacon Hill. 'Magic is just a word for what's left to the powerless once everyone else has eaten their fill.","author":"Catherynne M. Valente","tags":["magic","power","powerlessness"],"id":7320,"author_id":"Catherynne+M.+Valente"},{"text":"It is important to announce your intentions at top volume, she thought, or your intentions will think you are ashamed of them.","author":"Catherynne M. Valente","tags":["intentions","loud","shame","top-volume"],"id":7618,"author_id":"Catherynne+M.+Valente"},{"text":"The rapt pupil will be forgiven for assuming the Tsar of Death to be wicked and the Tsar of Life to be virtuous. Let the truth be told: There is no virtue anywhere. Life is sly and unscrupulous, a blackguard, wolfish, severe. In service to itself, it will commit any offense. So, too, is Death possessed of infinite strategies and a gaunt nature- but also mercy, also grace and tenderness. In his own country, Death can be kind.","author":"Catherynne M. Valente","tags":["death"],"id":8035,"author_id":"Catherynne+M.+Valente"},{"text":"And in her long nights, in her long house of smoke and miller's stones, she baked the bread we eat in dreams, strangest loaves, her pies full of anguish and days long dead, her fairy-haunted gingerbread, her cakes wet with tears.","author":"Catherynne M. Valente","tags":["dreams"],"id":11965,"author_id":"Catherynne+M.+Valente"},{"text":"Listen, everything is possible in here. You can burn every spinning wheel in the kingdom. You can cut your hair before he ever gets the chance to climb up. It is possible to decline the beanstalk. You can let the old witch dance at your wedding, hand out the kind of forgiveness that would wake the dead and sleeping. You can just walk away, get on a horse, and go wake some other maiden from her narrative coffin, if you’re brave, if you’re strong. What do you want? Do you want to escape? Or were you looking for that candy house?","author":"Catherynne M. Valente","tags":["patterns","stories"],"id":13417,"author_id":"Catherynne+M.+Valente"},{"text":"What is it, Master Calligrapher, that little girls do in the way that spiders weave?' sleeve asked primly.The Calligrapher coughed, for his room was very dusty, and there was dust even on his eyelashes, and said: 'It is right and proper,' he said, 'for a girl to read as many books as there are bricks in this city, and then, when she is finished, to begin to write new ones which are made out of the old ones, as this city is made of those stones.","author":"Catherynne M. Valente","tags":["books","girls"],"id":13548,"author_id":"Catherynne+M.+Valente"},{"text":"The dude feels right fatherly. Takes her down to the crick to wash the underground off of her. Just can't bring himself to shoot her while she's filthy and starving. There's time. Offers her a cake of French-milled soap he brought all the way out from Chicago. Smells like gardenias if you know your flowers, and the dude does. Snow White knows something's skewed but she grabs it, strips off like it's nothing and climbs in the water. She don't shiver even though that stream has to be as cold as a wagon tire. The miner's crud comes off her in black ribbons. The duded watches another girl come out of the blind mole-skin she was walking around it. This one has muscles like a mountain cat and a kind of pretty he doesn't know what to do with. For fairness he'd take her stepmother six days and twice on Sunday. The beauty Snow White's got has nothing to do with him. She's scarred up and suspicious an shameless. Her pretty's not for him. It's like saying the moon's got a fine figure on her. Maybe true, but what good is that to a man?","author":"Catherynne M. Valente","tags":["beauty","guns","moon","snow-white"],"id":16037,"author_id":"Catherynne+M.+Valente"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":270,"pages":27,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}