Radiance Quotes

“She is dead. Almost certainly dead. Nearly conclusively dead. She is, at the very least, not answering her telephone.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“Buck up, baby blowfish. Just puff up bigger than your sadness and scare it right off. That's the only way to live in the awful old ocean.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“It was on the to-do list, but you know to-do lists. They get longer and longer until you might as well just carve the last items on your tombstone. Do the dishes.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“A tale may have exactly three beginnings: one for the audience, one for the artist, and one for the poor bastard who has to live in it.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“Because noir isn’t really a new thing at all. It’s just a fairy tale with guns. Your hardscrabble detective is nothing more than a noble knight with a cigarette and a disease where his heart should be. He talks prettier, that’s all. He’s no less idealistic—there’re good women and bad women, good jobs and bad jobs. Justice and truth are always worth seeking. He pulls his fedora down like the visor on a suit of armour. He serves his lord faithfully whether he wants to or not. And he is in thrall to the idea of a woman. It’s just that in detective stories, women are usually dead before the curtain goes up. In fairy tales, they’re usually alive.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“Trouble is, most times, when you go looking to sell your soul, nobody's buying.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“Anything is a poem if you say it often enough.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“Night poured itself down my throat. Night was my wine and my meat. Night wed me and bedded me, widowed me and murdered me and resurrected me whole a thousand times over with each hour.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“Mug your destiny in an alley and punch it until it gives you what you want”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“I abandoned her. It's the one capital crime of fatherhood. Mothers can fail a thousand different ways. A father's only job is: do not abandon this child.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“Remember that the expressions and vocal patterns you are committing to film will become synecdoches... That means something little that stands in for something big. Your smile will stand in for all human happiness. Your tears will be a model for everyone else's sadness.
...You have a responsibility to the people who will repeat your lines, wink your winks, imitate your laughter without knowing they are imitating anything. This is the secret power that actors hold. It is almost like being a god. We create what it is to be human when we stand fifty feet tall on a silk screen.
So you'd better be good at it, for God's sake.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“Love me, and I will laugh for you, and if you can make me laugh, my laughter will, quite simply, ransom the whole of the world from death.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“It tasted like a shade of white near blue; it tasted like the idea of pearls; it tasted like a memory nearly grasped but lost at the last moment.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“It's only that the answers in most stories are boring because they are supplied by the real world rather than, well, something better. Something more stimulating. Sit down with the Greeks and the Romans, and the boring answers get more interesting. Seasons because a girl and a crocus. Death because a girl and an apple. The moon because a girl keeps driving her daft chariot into the sea.
It's all down to girls, one way or another.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“I'm lonely, whispered Doctor Callow.

Don't be. There's a million worlds to play with.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“Nothing real is pretty, she said. Only a doll is pretty. And a pretty doll drinks out of a tiny cup forever. A woman wants a big cup.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“How many beginnings can a story have, Daddy?"
"As many as you can eat, my lamb. But only one ending. Or maybe it's the other way around: one beginning and a whole Easter basket of endings."
"Papa, don't be silly... A story has to start somewhere. And then it has to end somewhere. That's the whole point. That's how it is in real life."
"But that's not how it is in real life, Rinny. Real life is all beginnings. Days, weeks, children, journeys, marriages, inventions. Even a murder is the beginning of a criminal. Perhaps even a spree. Everything is prologue. Every story has a stutter. It just keeps starting and starting until you decide to shut the camera off. Half the time you don't even realize that what you're choosing for breakfast is the beginning of a story that won't pan out till you're sixty and staring at the pastry that made you a widower. No, love, in real life you can get all the way to death and never have finished one single story. Or never even get one so much as half-begun.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“Still, I did love him. He never minded if I wore my pyjamas for a week and didn't brush my hair. That's a good quality to have in a man. Maybe the best a girl could hope for, considering. And, by Jove, he loves that child. Did you know you can fall in love with the way a man loves someone else? Love takes so much effort. You have to get up ever so early in the morning to really love someone properly.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“And the funny, impish magic of a wrap party is that everyone still has scraps of their characters hanging off them like Salome's veils, fluttering, fading, but not quite finished tangling the tongue and tripping the feet. You're not in Wonderland anymore, but you positively reek of rabbit.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“It's just that in detective stories, women are usually dead before the curtain goes up. In fairy tales, they're usually alive. Fairy tales are about survival. That's all they're about. The princess lives to get married in the last act. The detective solves the woman; the knight saves her.
And really, really, when you put a fairy tale together with grime and despair and industrial angst you get the Gothic, and that's where we live, Percy.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“I used to look up at night and dream of the solar system. I know, I know—who didn't? But your own dreams seem so special, so terribly yours, until you grow up and figure out they're just like everyone else's. How perfect and beautiful and silent and dead each planet hung in my heart! All nine names, written in squiggly, shaky handwriting, glowing inside me.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“Humans do not proceed in an orderly fashion from one scene to the next. Memory lies underneath happenstance; hope and dread sprawl on top. Our days and nights are their endless orgies.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“Being on time is a filthy habit practised only by roosters and retirees.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“We’ve made too many movies, you and I. Or too few. Always too few. Too many to have any meaning, too few to say what we meant.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“Names aren't loners, they're connected, even in real life. You name your kids for someone dead or what you hope they will become or what you wish you were and your parents did the same to you and that big, glittering net of names tells the story of the whole world. Names are load-bearing struts. Names are destiny.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“No good thing can last forever, because people are terrible and we have this feeling, we all have this feeling, that if not for that essential terribleness we could have gotten further by now. Done better. Done more.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“It's a fairy tale. A children's story. Not a funny or silly one, but one with blood and death and horror, because that's fairy tales, too. A kid got swallowed by a whale. A little Pinocchio. A little Caliban. It's all there. And, you know, in a fairy tale, the maidens are never dead - not really. They're just sleeping.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“You see her as you see anyone in this world: distorted, warped, reflected, refracted, contorted, mutilated by time.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“...the beginning is where the end gets born.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“Very well, you do so love rules! I shall make some up for you on the spot, so that my little moppet is not forced to wander the world in a soup of stories without laws. A tale may have exactly three beginnings: one for the audience, one for the artist, and one for the poor bastard who has to live in it.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance