Radiance Quotes

“Honestly, Ada Lop was the best interviewer I ever met. She got you off your guard. She asked things nobody asked. You never got to know her, but she'd get every last drop out of you and in her cup. I always wear her wedding ring when I interview somebody. It has a black amber stone in it with a gold flaw, like an eye. And she did exactly like I asked. Whatever my father failed to do, she picked up; taught me how to fix a cannon and do my own taxes and do a perfect plié and that to perform, to really perform, you have to make yourself ugly at some point. 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

“I've come to think you only get so much bravery in one lifetime and if you spend it too soon, you're all out of fuck it all to hell by the time you really need it.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“Endings are lush and lascivious, Vince; they call to me. All spread out on satin inevitabilities, waiting, beckoning, promising impossibly, obscenely elegant solutions—if you've been a good lad and dressed the house just so, for its comfort, for its arousal. All the rest of the nonsense a story requires is must a long seduction of the ending.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“All the rest of the nonsense a story requires is just a long seduction of the ending.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“Come forward.
Come in from the summer heat and the flies. Come in from that assault on all senses, that pummelling of rod and cone and drum and cilia. Come in from the great spotlight of the sun, sweeping across the white sands, making everyone, and therefore no one, a star.

Come inside and meet the prologue.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“I can't even say her name. She doesn't even have a name. She is she. She is her. She possesses the pronoun so completely that no one else can touch it. There is only one her in the great stinking gas giant of my heart, fifty feet high. She is a giantess. I am no one. Well, not "no one". I am Anchises St. John. But I am no one's him.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“This is how you learn to see: You put together a crew. No one can see a damn thing clearly with only two eyes.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“No, love, in real life you can get all the way to death and never have finished one single story.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“I remember she sang the opening aria from Her Last Nocturne and I saw the night sky pour out of her mouth. Every time I wemt to hear her sing afterward, even months afterward, I saw the same thing. Blackness and stars flooding her mouth and splashing onto the boards in great gouts. Galaxies and the void dripping off her chin. Her teeth burning. I told her about it on a night in December and she whispered I know it, baby. I see it, too. That's my insides coming out.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“I won't be one of the hundreds telling you that being alive flows like a story you write consciously, deliberately, full of linear narrative, foreshadowing, repetition, motifs. The emotional beats come down where they should, last as long as they should, end where they should, and that should come from somewhere real and natural, not from the tyranny of the theatre, the utter hegemony of fiction.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“All the rest of the nonsense a story requires is just a long seduction of the ending. You throw out murders and reversals and heroes and detectives and spies, juggle love affairs and near escapes and standoffs with marvellous guns, kidnappings and sorcery and comic relief and gravediggers and princesses and albino dragons, and it's all just to lure an ending into your bed.”
― 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.” A”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“Who knows what wild things Sleeping Beauty dreamt of while waiting to awake?”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“Any story told is a lie cunningly told to hide the real world from the poor bastards who live in it.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“But that wouldn't be honest. That wouldn't be real. That would give you the idea that a life is a simple thing to tell, that it's obvious where to start--BIRTH--and even more obvious where to stop--DEATH. Fade from black to black.
I won't have it. I won't be one of the hundreds telling you that being alive flows like a story you write consciously, deliberately, full of linear narrative, foreshadowing, repetition, motifs. The emotional beats come down where they should, last as long as they should, end when they should, and that 'should' come from somewhere real and natural, not from the tyranny of the theatre, the utter hegemony of fiction. Why, isn't living easy? Isn't it grand? As easy as reading aloud.
No.
If I slice it all up and stitch it back together, you might not understand what I've been trying to say all my life: that any story is a lie cunningly told to hide the real world from the poor bastards who live in it. I can't. I can't tell you that lie...
If I fixed it so time goes the way you expect, you might come away thinking I know what the hell I'm doing.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“Being unable to retrace our steps in Time, we decided to move forward in Space. Shall we never be able to glide back up the stream of Time, and peep into the old home, and gaze on the old faces? Perhaps when the phonograph and the kinesigraph are perfected, and some future worker has solved the problem of colour photography, our descendants will be able to deceive themselves with something very like it: but it will be but a barren husk, a soulless phantasm and nothing more. “Oh for the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that is still!” —Wordsworth Donisthorpe, inventor of the kinesigraph camera”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“She always gave the impression of having accidentally wandered in from a mad scientist’s conference, and felt rather desperate to get back.”
― 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

“Breakfast brought an oppressive gloom down upon my spirit. Soft-boiled eggs oozed a golden ichor of loneliness onto my spoon; the buttered rolls spoke only of the further torment of my being. Failure swirled in the milky depths of my tea and the bacon I devoured was the bacon of grief.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“[...] She started disappearing as soon as she was born. Just to get away from you.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“It was closing in on midnight, the kind of midnight you only get on Uranus after a three day bender. Ultramarine fog reeking of ethanol and neon and some passing whore's rosewater. Snow piled up like bodies in tbhe street. Twenty-seven moons lighting up what ought to be a respectable witching hour so you can't help but see yourself staring back in every slick glowpink skyscraper.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“That's how it goes—as soon as there's anything interesting in Ancient Greece, some arsehole with a magic hat comes along to murder it.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“Everything in creation is just a trick of the light - the only difference between heaven and hell is who's running those lights, who's got the switch, who knows the cues.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“Our parents tell us the story of our beginning and they have total control over it--they know they've changed it, and we know they've changed it, but we just let them. They massage the details to reflect who we are now, so that there will be a sense to it: you are this because that. We gave you a blanket with birdies on it and now you're a pilot, how lovely! All so that we think of ourselves as being in . . . not just a story, but a good story. One written in full command of their craft. Someone who abides by the contract with the audience, even if the audience is us. Everyone loves a system. Everyone relaxes.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“Coyness is what makes it art, darling. Otherwise … otherwise it’s nothing but a funeral.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“Anyway, nobody bothers with real beginnings anymore. We stopped making up stories about the creation of the world ages ago.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“I'm an extra in your story. Well, you're an extra in mine, boy.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“Not too much call for knowing the American gene spread on the snowball.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“The name sounded to her like yellow sunlight on brown, dry earth, and she took it the way some young persons take trinkets when a shopkeeper's back is turned, even though it was a boy's name.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance

“She smelled like accounts receivable. She looked like old money.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance