The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two Quotes

“A silent Library is a sad Library. A Library without patrons on whom to pile books and tales and knowing and magazines full of up-to-the-minute politickal fashions and atlases and plays in pentameter! A Library should be full of exclamations! Shouts of delight and horror as the wonders of the world are discovered or the lies of the heavens are uncovered or the wild adventures of devil-knows-who sent romping out of the pages. A Library should be full of now-just-a-minutes and that-can't-be-rights and scientifick folk running skelter to prove somebody wrong. It should positively vibrate with laughing at comedies and sobbing at tragedies, it should echo with gasps as decent ladies glimpse indecent things and indecent ladies stumble upon secret and scandalous decencies! A Library should not shush; it should roar!”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

“Marriage is a wrestling match where you hold on tight while your mate changes into a hundred different things. The trick is that you're changing into a hundred other things, but you can't let go. You can only try to match up and never turn into a wolf while he's a rabbit, or a mouse while he's still busy being an owl, a brawny black bull while he's a little blue crab scuttling for shelter. It's harder than it sounds.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

“Listen to me. Love is a Yeti. It is bigger than you and frightening and terrible. It makes loud and vicious noises. It is hungry all the time. It has horns and teeth and the force of its fists is more than anyone can bear. It speeds up time and slows it down. And it has its own aims and missions that those who are lucky enough to see it cannot begin to guess. You might see a Yeti once in your life or never. You might live in a village of them. But in the end, not matter how fast you think you can go, the Yeti is always faster than you, and you can only choose how you say hello to it, and whether you shake its hand.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

“That's just the first part. What others call you, you become. It's a terrible magic that everyone can do — so do it. Call yourself what you wish to become.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

“So it is written - but so, too, it is crossed out. You can write it over again. You can make notes in the margins. You can cut out the whole page. You can, and you must, edit and rewrite and reshape and pull out the wrong parts like bones and find just the thing and you can forever, forever, write more and more and more, thicker and longer and clearer. Living is a paragraph, constantly rewritten. It is Grown-Up Magic. Children are heartless; their parents hold them still, squirming and shouting, until a heart can get going in their little lawless wilderness. Teenagers crash their hearts into every hard and thrilling thing to see what will give and what will hold. And Grown-Ups, when they are very good, when they are very lucky, and very brave, and their wishes are sharp as scissors, when they are in the fullness of their strength, use their hearts to start their story over again.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

“At the bottom of philosophy something very true and very desperate whispers: Everyone is hungry all the time. Everyone is starving. Everyone wants so much, much more than they can stomach, but the appetite doesn't converse much with the stomach. Everyone is hungry and not only for food - for comfort and love and excitement and the opposite of being alone. Almost everything awful anyone does is to get those things and keep them.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

“Just because it's imaginary doesn't mean it isn't real.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

“Who told you you couldn't come back when you're grown? Was it the same person who told you grown-ups don't cry or blush or clap their hands when they're happy? Don't try to say otherwise, I've seen you fighting like a boxer to change your face so that it never shows anything. Whoever told you that's what growing up means is a villain, as true as a mustache. I am growing up, too, and look at me! I cry and I blush and I live in Fairyland always!”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

“It's saying no. That's your first hint that something's alive. It says no. That's how you know a baby is starting to turn into a person. They run around saying no all day, throwing their aliveness at everything to see what it'll stick to. You can't say no if you don't have desires and opinions and wants of your own. You wouldn't even want to. No is the heart of thinking.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

“The whole point of growing up is to get big enough to hold the world you want inside you. But it takes a long time, and you really must eat your vegetables, and most often you have to make the world you want out of yourself.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

“He missed you
like a fish in a bowl
misses the open sea.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

“It is such hard work to keep your heart hidden! And worse, by the time you find it easy, it will be harder still to show it. It is a terrible magic in this world to ask for exactly the thing you want. Not least because to know exactly the thing you want and look it in the eye is a long, long labor.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

“It's Latin, which is an excellent language for mischief-making, which is why governments are so fond of it.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

“Shall I tell her? Shall I be a kind and merciful narrator and take our girl aside? Shall I touch her new, red heart and make her understand that she is no longer one of the tribe of heartless children, nor even the owner of the wild and infant heart of thirteen-year-old girls and boys? Oh, September! Hearts, once you have them locked up in your chest, are a fantastic heap of tender and terrible wonders - but they must be trained. Beatrice could have told her all about it. A heart can learn ever so many tricks, and what sort of beast it becomes depends greatly upon whether it has been taught to sit up or to lie down, to speak or to beg, to roll over or to sound alarm, to guard or to attack, to find or to stay. But the trick most folk are so awfully fond of learning, the absolute second they've got hold of a heart, is to pretend they don't have one at all. It is the very first danger of the hearted. Shall I give fair warning, as neither you nor I was given?”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

“There is no such thing as a people who are all wicked or even all good. Everyone chooses. But even they, even they looked at people and saw only tools. No one is a cup for another to drink from.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

“After all, growing up is nothing but an argument with your parents on the topic of whether or not you are grown. You scream am so am so am so from the moment you're born, and they fire back are not are not are not from the moment they've got you, and on it goes until you can say it loudest.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

“All money is imaginary," answered the Calcatrix simply. "Money is magic everyone agrees to pretend is not magic. Observe! You treat it like magic, wield it like magic, fear it like magic! Why should a body with more small circles of copper or silver or gold than anyone else have an easy life full of treats every day and sleeping in and other people bowing down? The little circles can't get up and fight a battle or make a supper so splendid you get full just by looking at it or build a house of a thousand gables. They can do those things because everyone agrees to give them power. If everyone agreed to stop giving power to pretty metals and started giving it to thumbnails or mushroom caps or roof shingles or first kisses or tears or hours or puffin feathers, those little circles would just lay there tarnishing in the rain and not making anyone bow their noses down to the ground or stick them up in the air.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

“Family is a transitive property.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

“All Librarians are Secret Masters of Severe Magic. Goes with the territory.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

“But the trouble is, I do want to be surprised. I want to choose. I broke the heart of my fate so that I could choose. I never chose; I only saw a little girl who looked like me standing on a gear at the end of the world and laughing, and that's not choosing, not really. Wouldn't you rather I chose you? Wouldn't you rather I picked our future out of all the others anyone could have?”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

“September laughed a little. She tried to make it sound light and happy, as though it were all over now and how funny it was, when you think about it, that simply not having another person by you could hurt so. But it did not come out quite right; there was a heaviness in her laughing like ice at the bottom of a glass. She still missed Saturday, yet he was standing right beside her! Missing him had become a part of her, like a hard, dark bone, and she needed so much more than a few words to let it go. In all this while, she had spent more time missing Saturday than seeing him.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

“The trouble with lies is that they love company. Once you tell a single lie, that lie gets terribly excited and calls all its friends to visit. Soon you find yourself making room for them in every corner, turning down beds and lighting lamps to make them comfortable, feeding them and tidying them and mending them when they start to wear thin.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

“But what my car needs is gas, not memories! How can you make a car go on memories?'
B.D. scratched under her Admiral's hat. 'What'd you think gas was, girl? 'Course there's all sorts of fuel, wind and wishes and chocolate cake and collard greens and water and brawn, but you're wanting the kind that burns in an engine. That kind of gas is nothing more than the past stored up and fermented and kept down in the cellar of the earth till it's wanted. Gas is saved-up sunlight. Giant ferns and apples of immortality and dimetrodons and cyclopses and werewhales drank up the sun as it shone on their backs a million years ago and used it to be a bigger fern or make more werewhales or drop seeds of improbability.' Her otter's paws moved quick and sure, selecting a squat, square bottle here and a round rosy one there. 'It so happens sunshine has a fearful memory. It sticks around even after its favorite dimetrodon dies. Gets hard and wily. Turns into something you can touch, something you can drill, something you can pour. But it still remembers having one eye and slapping the ocean's face with a great heavy tail. It liked making more dinosaurs and growing a frond as tall as a bank. It likes to make things alive, to make things go.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

“You poor girl, what sort of aged, unfriendly Libraries have you met in short life? A silent Library is a sad Library ... A Library should be full of exclamations! ... A Library should be full of now-just-a-minutes and that-can't-be-rights and scientifick folk running skelter to prove somebody wrong... A Library should not shush ; it should roar !”
― Catherynne M. Valente , The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

“Clothes are a story you choose to tell about yourself, a different one every day.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

“She had a highly developed sense of humor which in some lights looked a bit like a sense of justice.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

“All jobs are odd, or they would be games or naps or picnics.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

“Time is the only magic, he said, "And Marids swim through time like the sea. Think: if you hurt yourself, and I bandage it, and after weeks and weeks it gets well and there's no scar, that's not magic at all. But if you hurt yourself and I touch you and it heals in a moment, you'd call me magic before your skin closed. It's not magic to cook a feast, roasting and baking and frying for hours, but if you blink and it's steaming in front of you, it's a spell. If you work for what you want and save for it and plan it out just as precisely as you possibly can, it's not even surprising if you get it on the other side of a month or a year. But if you snap your fingers and it happens as soon as you want t, every wizard will want to know you socially. If you life straight through a hundred years and watch yourself unfold at one second per second, one hour per hour, that's just being alive. If you go faster, you're a time traveler. If you jump over your unfolding and see how it all comes out, that's fate. But's all healing and cooking and planning and living, just the same. The only difference is time.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

“You’re not in love if you keep your own heart bricked up behind your bones. You’re only playing.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

“Music has more rules than math or magic and it's twice as dangerous as both or either.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two