Catherynne M. Valente Quotes

As soon as I did, everything, the whole room, just clicked.

He was like someone sleeping who woke suddenly and found the world...all the beauty of it, and the sadness too. The hunger and the thirst. Everything he had never thought about or known was there before him, and magnified into one person who by chance, or fate--call it what you will--happened to be me.

How many times would I throw this away before I realized it was what I had been looking for all along?

It's amazing in the blink of an eye you finally see the light.

If you have too many epiphanies, you're on some kind of drug.

It was all so clear now. Like everything had been lost in darkness, and then the sun came out. Some moments are like that.

You can read ten books and finally come across one detail, and it's like, "now everything else makes sense. Now I know where I am."

Surprise is the beginning of wisdom.

It hit me like a thunderbolt!

I don't believe dying's a sad thing.

Sometimes it takes a sudden change to make you realise just how bad things were.

The only time I actually got mad at God is when my dad completely changed and was my closest friend, and then he was taken from me too soon.

I gave up caring about anything, and all the problems disappeared. And it was after that that I found out the truth . I learnt the truth last November on the third of November, to be precise and I remember every instant since.

Think of a lifeless forest in which a small plant pushes its head upward, out of the ruin. In our grief process, we are moving into life from death, without denying the devastation that came before.

Right after I graduated, my girlfriend, who I had been going out with for five years, dumped me, and my grandmother died.

He stopped loving her today, they placed a wreath upon his door.

I could see why Archimedes got all excited. There was nothing finer than the feeling that came rushing through you when it clicked and you suddenly understood something that had puzzled you. It made you think it just might be possible to get a handle on this old world after all.

Rebirth is almost impossible without the darkness.....I tell myself I am experiencing the death of myself as mother, the death of myself as a younger woman -- precious old lives going by the wayside. Of course, I should let myself grieve. To deny the grief is to squander a transforming and radiant possibility.

In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in flashes. The text is the thunder rolling long afterward.

It's funny how things seem different, suddenly.

Death is no more than passing from one room into another.

It's not finding what's lost, it's understanding what you've found.

And just as I was climbing into that first-class seat, and wrapping myself in a blanket, just as I was adjusting my pillow behind my head, and having a sip of that champagne, and just as I was bringing down and adjusting my Thai purple sleep mask, I had an inkling. I had a flash. I suddenly thought I knew what it was that had killed Marilyn Monroe.

I think that feeling of reward comes from being able to find sometimes an unexpected reflection or insight that seems to transcend the description itself, where you actually realize you're concluding something that is a point of view, that may come across and actually touch people's conscience or minds in a way that could change, at least if not things, change points of view.

That's what does it-- that moment where you think you're lost, and then discover that you're not, that you've never really left. There's something that happens in that incredible tiny no-time, and that something is like the revelation of learning.