Catherynne M. Valente Quotes

Vanity was stronger than love at sixteen and there was no room in her hot heart now for anything but hate.

You and I, being grown-up and having lost our hearts at least twice or thrice along the way, might shut our eyes and cry out: Not that way, child! But as we have said, September was Somewhat Heartless, and felt herself reasonably safe on that road. Children always do.

Youth is a continual intoxication; it is the fever of reason.

I think, you know, when you're a teenager, sometimes your emotions are a little bit more drastic than maybe when you're in your 20s. You sort of level out a little bit.

If you think back to your time as a teenager, everything was dramatic.

I think, as you're growing up, your emotions are just as deep as they are when you're an adult. You're ability to feel lonely, longing, confused or angry are just as deep. We don't feel things more as we get older.

Children, even infants, are capable of sympathy. But only after adolescence are we capable of compassion.

When you're a teenager, your essence is so specific to being a teenager, and everything becomes so extreme. Your emotions are on the surface, and you oscillate between different things at one time.

I think all teenagers feel a lot of things at once; everything's going crazy in our brain.

I have a mental age of about 17. Far too young for marriage.

During teenager times, the feelings of longing is perhaps at its most strong and profound because everything feels multiplied by ten.

I don't think you ever love anything as passionately as you do when you're a teen. You remember the books you read as a young person your whole life. I feel so lucky to write for young adults.

Quick note here: if this crush-slash-swooning stuff is hard for you to stomach, if youve never had a similar experience, then you should come to grips with the fact that youve got a TV dinner for a heart and might want to consider climbing inside a microwave and turning it on high for at least an hour, which if you do consider only goes to show what kind of idiot you truly are because microwaves are way too small for anyone, let alone you, to climb into.

Being twenty years old, I naturally had a wild imagination and a tender heart.

But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes.

For all their strength, men were sometimes like little children.

I think all of us have our inner 13-year-old a lot closer to the surface than we're willing to admit even to ourselves.

Immoderate desire is the mark of a child, not a man.

How many really capable men are children more than once during the day!

I have the emotions of a child in the body of a woman. I was rushed into womanhood for the movies. It caused me long moments of unhappiness and doubt.

All children are heartless. They have not grown a heart yet, which is why they can climb tall trees and say shocking things and leap so very high that grown-up hearts flutter in terror. Hearts weigh quite a lot. That is why it takes so long to grow one. But, as in their reading and arithmetic and drawing, different children proceed at different speeds. (It is well known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else.) Some small ones are terrible and fey, Utterly Heartless. Some are dear and sweet and Hardly Heartless at all.

I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be.

I genuinely am sort of an emotionally stunted man-child, so if I just write to the top of my intelligence, it sounds like a teenager. I like being around teenagers. It's good for drama; they feel everything much more intensely than adults do, their lives are much more interesting than ours. They're mutants. They have these weird bodies that are rebelling against them and changing every day. Teenagers always equal good drama.

It was childish to feel disappointed, but childishness comes almost as naturally to a man as to a child.