Catherynne M. Valente Quotes

What we do belongs to what we are; and what we are is what becomes of us.

Well, I think the world changes around you - I think you don't change. That's as simple as that.

To transform yourself is to transform your destiny.

If you are not something, how do you become it? It is not obvious to me that you can be something you are not.

For whatsoever from one place doth fall, Is with the tide unto an other brought: For there is nothing lost, that may be found, if sought.

If a person realises his position and stays in his own self, things that are to happen will happen. Things that are not to happen will not happen. The shakti that is in the world, is only one. All these troubles arise if we think that we are separate from that shakti.

The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities

I did not lose myself all at once.

You can't become another person if you're not self-aware.

They say that when a man faces his destiny, the destiny ends and he becomes the man that he really is.

If you live life, then you become what are.

Some people spend their whole lives looking for themselves, yet our self is the one thing we surely cannot lose (how like a cheap philosopher I am become, staying in this benighted place). From the moment we are conceived it is the pattern in our blood and our bones are printed through with it like sticks of seaside rock. Nora, on the other hand, says that she’s surprised anyone knows who they are, considering that every cell and molecule in our bodies has been replaced many times over since we were born.

You aren't an object. You're a process of some sort.

We were all heading for each other on a collision course, no matter what. Maybe some people are just meant to be in the same story.

You can be a pharaoh. Like, a pharaoh means, that which you will become.

I don't think that anything happens by coincidence... No one is here by accident... Everyone who crosses our path has a message for us. Otherwise they would have taken another path, or left earlier or later. The fact that these people are here means that they are here for some reason".

Until we see what we are, we cannot take steps to become what we should be.

I really do believe that there's no such thing as coincidence. People come into our lives for a reason.

When you abide in the I you're abiding in the ego. The I is really the ego, the small I. It turns into the Self eventually.

Somewhere, on the long road that wound through those four years, the girl with her sachet & dancing slippers had slipped away & there was left a woman with sharp green eyes, who counted pennies & turned her hands to many menial tasks, a woman to whom nothing was left from the wreckage except the indestructible red earth on which she stood.

I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they're right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.

I think things happen between people for a reason.

Nothing changes until it becomes what it is.

I will come back to you, I swear I will; And you will know me still. I shall be only a little taller Than when I went.

Just when I think I have learned the way to live, life changes and I am left the same. The more things change the more I am the same. I am what I started with, and when it is all over I will be all that is left of me.