Deathless Quotes

“If the world is divided into seeing and not seeing, Marya thought, I shall always choose to see.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“This is a very marvelous thing. A winter thing, when everything is pickled and preserved under glass. You can taste summer in this mixture, summer boiled down and soaked in brine, mummified, packed with spices to be born again on this table, in this place, in this snow.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“I do not serve your personal issues, Morevna. I serve the People, and the People will have crimes against their body answered. You fought at Leningrad. So did I. Why should he be spared?'
'Somebody ought to be.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“Perhaps one was not meant to see what a husband looked like before he made himself more or less presentable. Perhaps the republic of husbands was a strange and frightening place full of not only birds, but bats too, and lizards, and bears, and worms, and other beasts waiting to fall out of a tree and into a wedding ring.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“You will live as you live in any world,' Madame Lebedeva said. She reached out her hand as if to grasp Marya's, as if to press it to her cheek, then closed her fingers, as if Marya's hand were in hers. 'With difficulty, and grief.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“Koschei the Deathless made a face as he tasted the wine. “It is far too sweet. Comrade Stalin fears bitterness and has the tastes of a spoiled princess. I savor bitterness—it is born of experience. It is the privilege of one who has truly lived. You, too, must learn to prefer it. After all, when all else is gone, you may still have bitterness in abundance.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“There is still a place in me, Masha, where my death once lay. I have a pain there, the way some men feel their legs long after they’ve been cut off at the knee. It is my pain, and I cannot share it. I would not, even if I could. I will age with you, if it will please you. I will match you, wrinkle for wrinkle, grey hair for grey hair, creak for creak, tumor for tumor. You will be so beautiful when you are old.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“She passed a hand over her eyes. A year and more now, that she had needed glasses.
'Look', those glasses said from her desk. 'Look how much you are not like the others. You grow older and your eyes wear out. In case you could ever mistake yourself for belonging'.
Marya supposed this was why no one asked after stolen fairy tale girls. What embarassment they turn out to be. They grow tempers; they join the army; they need glasses. Who wants them?”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“I lost sight of myself so long ago that I'm hesistant to try to find myself. I'm afraid to begin. Existing sometimes gives me heart palpitations.
I'm so afraid to be me.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“You are my treasure, my pale gold, the heart of my heart. You lie at the bottom of my being and gnaw upon my roots.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“If I let him do this to me, what else will I allow? Anything, anything, anything.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“Geography was fungible, fluid, unreliable.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“Lebedeva snapped her fingers. “It’s like lying!” she exclaimed. “Well, we understand that, of course! The bigger the lie, the happier the liar.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“We hold demonstrations and civil wars when inequities are discovered.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“Twelve mothers and twelve fathers were stacked into the long, thin house, each with four children, drawing the old cobalt-and-silver curtains down the center of rooms to make labyrinths of twelve dining rooms, twelve stting rooms, twelve bedrooms. It could be said, and was, that Marya Morevna had twelve mothers and twelve fathers, and so did all the children of that long, thin house.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“A prophetic world that can never come true.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“there is only this world, as it is now, and there has never been another, can never be any other.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“The ghosts will eat everything because the bellies of ghosts want the whole world, just to fill one tiny corner.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“The rapt pupil will be forgiven for assuming the Tsar of Death to be wicked and the Tsar of Life to be virtuous. Let the truth be told: There is no virtue anywhere. Life is sly and unscrupulous, a blackguard, wolfish, severe. In service to itself, it will commit any offense. So, too, is Death possessed of infinite strategies and a gaunt nature—but also mercy, also grace and tenderness. In his own country, Death can be kind. But of an end to their argument, we shall have none, not ever, until the end of all.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“It was late spring when Marya Morevna slid her brass key into the lock of the house on Dzerzhinskaya Street, feeling it slide, too, between her own ribs, and open her like a reliquary full of old, nameless bones.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“Why is it safe for you and not for me?" whispered Marya Morevna.
"Because you're still a girl." The vintovnik grinned. "Girls have to obey rules. Chyerti break them.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“And the heart of Ivan Nikolayevich broke inside the body of Marya Morevna, and the pieces of him lodged deep in her bones, and through the window, the stars watched.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“Time is communal, Marya Morevna, the most purely communal of all commodities. It belongs to us all equally.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“There is a room in the dark. Where a ceiling fell through, and a floor, until all that was left was a hole leading down into the earth, into a basement. Into the shadows, peacock tapestries fell dusty and burning. A table lies broken down there, and a great chair of bone. You should go there. At night, when no one can see you. I could never guess what you might find in the frozen mud and shattered walls. I am not a betting woman these days. But you know, in the end, you can only be yourself in a basement, in the black, underneath everything, where no one can find you.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“She still longed for the best heights of magic, to see dragons and mermaids, to see the naked world.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“In war you must always choose sides. One or the other. Silver or black. Human or demon. If you try to be a bridge laid down between them, they will tear you in half.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“I suppose because it's boring to keep telling stories where people just get born and grow up and get married and die. So they add strange things in, to make it interesting when a person is born, more satisfying when they get married, sadder when they die.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“Marya supposed this was why no one asked after stolen fairy tale girls. What embarrassments they turn out to be. They grow tempers; they join the army; they need glasses. Who wants them?”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“A body needs a good memento mori to flush out the humors.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“Baba Yaga whirled on her, the tails of her fur coat whipping around. “Don’t you call me comrade, little girl. We aren’t equals and we aren’t friends. Chairman Yaga. That comrade nonsense is just a hook by which the low pull down the high. And then what do you get? Everyone rolling around in the same shit, like pigs.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless