Catherynne M. Valente Quotes

At the temple there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.

There's nothing glorious about war. There's nothing glorious about holding your friends in your arms and watching them die. There's nothing glorious about having to leave your home for 6 to 8 months while your family's back here and you're away.

My biggest fear in life is losing the people I love, and the thing with cancer is that it seems that you can't really control it.

I have no words for my reality.

Well, my mother, I knew until I was 13. She died when I was 13.

The wars don't end when you sign peace treaties or when the years go by. They will echo on until I'm gone and all the widows and orphans are gone.

I've walked on a lot of battlefields. Most of them are not haunted.

I died on that mountain, too. I left a part of myself up there.

Whether by my own volition or otherwise, I was given a year-and-a-half break after Dad passed. It was kind of like an elephant in the room, and everyone was giving me space, whether I wanted it or not.

And the general shot my sister. I could not look at her, but I remember the sound of when she hit the ground. I hear that sound when things hit the ground still. Anything.' If I could, I would make it so nothing ever hit the ground again.

Yes, my mother's death is a terrible sorrow to me. I feel - do you know what I mean - the silence of it so. She was more alive than anyone I have ever known.

It's too late to fall in love with Sharon Tate / But it's too soon to ask me for the words I want carved on my tomb.

The cries of the dead are terrible indeed; you should try not to hear them.

Here is one of the worst things about having someone you love die: It happens again every single morning.

Everything that belonged to her husband made her weep again: his tasseled slippers, his pajamas under the pillow, the space of his absence in the dressing table mirror, his own odor on her skin. A vague thought made her shudder: "The people one loves should take all their things with them when they die.

I'll picture Rat Kiley face, his grief, and I'll think, You dumb cooze. Because she wasn't listening. It wasn't a war story. It was a love story.

I saw my own blood and I thought, how could I live in a world where this exists- where love can become death?

I answer the heroic question, 'Death, where is thy sting?' with 'It is in my heart and mind and memories.

I needed, I decided, to really know her, because I needed more to remember. Before I could begin the shameful process of forgetting the how and the why of her living and dying, I needed to learn it: How. Why. When. Where. What.

I don't know. Both my parents are dead. So? Wait, I got pictures of their corpses in my wallet. I had them blown up as murals. Here.

It's different when the person you love dies. There's an awful finality to death. But it is final. The end. And there's the funeral, family gatherings, grieving, all of those necessary rituals. And they help, believe me. When the object of your love just disappears, there's no way to deal with the grief and pain.

Then I went to the morgue and saw that those bones weren't yours, heard your voice again in my head" -his eyes closed- "and once more, nothing else mattered.

What shall a man say when a friend has vanished behind the doors of Death? A mere tangle of barren words, only words.

She was the kind of girlfriend God gives you young, so you'll know loss the rest of your life.