Best Of Catherynne M. Valente's "Radiance"
Here is a selection of memorable quotes from Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente
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 a prologue. Every store has a stutter. It just keeps starting and starting until you decide to shut the camera off. Half the time you don't even realise that what you're choosing for breakfast is the beginning of a story that won't pan out till you're sixty and string 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.
p.22
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.
p.40
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.
p.42
I am very pretty, though my prettiness lacks depth and therefore misses beauty by a hair.
p.124
A woman has but eight roles open to her: ingenue, mother, witch, detective, nun, whore, queen, and corpse.
p.125
I love wrap parties more than just about anything else in the world.
Oh it's lovely to plan, and lovely to work, but having worked is ever so much better. And dancing yourself silly in pearls knowing you don't have a thing to do tomorrow is the best of all! The fine and fatigued positively sparkle with the frantic frizz of having pulled it off despite the odds - you can't help being light on your feet with all the weight off your shoulders. It's the party at the end of the world - the quick, fantastic world you've all made together, a world that now exists only on a heap of black tape in a tin can. Oh, well! On to the next one! And the funny, impish magic of a wrap party is that everyone still has scraps of their characters hanging off of 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. It's a secret, rollicking room where everything is still half make-believe.
p.234-235
I have never been a master of the secret code of men's suits; only adept enough to know that the jacket is always saying something, the shoes and trousers always whispering, but not enough to know exactly what they're on about.
p.277
It's the one capital crime of fatherhood. Mothers can fail a thousand ways. A father's only job is: do not abandon this child. And what did I do? I let her run wild and never called her back in for supper when the sun got low.
p.365
I didn't really think anyone played the bassoon anymore. It's an instrument out of books and poems and grandads manning the watch on the prow of lonely, starlit ships. It sounds plaintive and kind in the desert dark.
p.395
I've come to think you only get so much bravery in one lifetime, and if you spent it too soon, you're all out of fu-k it it all to hell by the time you really need it.
p.399
