Catherynne M. Valente Quotes

Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.

The future? Like unwritten books and unborn children, you don't talk about it.

Darkness is full of possibility.

I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it.

As long as a thing is unknown, it belongs to us in a way that well-known things do not. For we have the opportunity to fill the empty, unknown spaces for ourselves, and in them there is room for imagination and for hope.

The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.

We know so little of the why, what the universe is, what infinity is. The veil around us is very fragile.

Magic provides a way of still having room for possibilities, an unlimited sense of what the world offers. Magic is always there when science is found wanting.

The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.

Man lives in a world of surmise, of mystery, of uncertainties.

I love the unknown. I love the discovery of what will be happening and just kind of sitting back and not knowing.

If there were no mystery left to explore life would get rather dull, wouldn't it?

Both the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it.

If there wasn't mystery, people wouldn't have anything to ponder. If you already knew everything, you wouldn't have anything to think about and life would just be really boring.

That's what I'm interested in: the space in between, the moment of imagining what is possible and yet not knowing what that is.

There are things known and things unknown and in between are the doors.

One can never produce anything as terrible and impressive as one can awesomely hint about.

When you are young, there is so much ahead of you, it's like the Saharan desert. You can't even see across it.

I love the unexplainable. It would be so boring to me if everything could be explained.

Within that awful volume lies The mystery of mysteries!

Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise.

To most of us the future seems unsure. But then it always has been; and we who have seen great changes must have great hopes.

Who knows what may lie around the next corner? There may be a window somewhere ahead. It may look out on a field of sunflowers.

At night, the house thick with sleep, she would peer out her bedroom window at the trees and sky and feel the presence of a mystery. Some possibility that included her--separate from her present life and without its limitations. A secret. Riding in the car with her father, she would look out at other cars full of people she'd never seen, any one of whom she might someday meet and love, and would feel the world holding her making its secret plans.

Tomorrow may never come to us. We do not live in tomorrow. We cannot find it in any of our title-deeds. The man who owns whole blocks of real estate, and great ships on the sea, does not own a single minute of tomorrow. Tomorrow! It is a mysterious possibility, not yet born. It lies under the seal of midnight-behind the veil of glittering constellations.