Amy (Sun)

“Some small ones learn to stitch together a Coat of Scowls or a Scarf of Jokes to hide their Hearts. Some hammer up a Fort of Books to protect theirs.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Boy Who Lost Fairyland

“Wife sounded like something exciting, something daring, something a bit scoundrelly, like pirate or bandit. And they were bandits, of course.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home

“Marriage, it seemed to me, walled my favorite fictional women off from the worlds in which they had once run free, or, if not free, then at least forward, with currents of narrative possibility at their backs. It was often at just the moment that their educations were complete and their childhood ambitions coming into focus that these troublesome, funny girls were suddenly contained, subsumed, and reduced by domesticity.”
― Rebecca Traister, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

“A story is a map of the world. A gloriously colored and wonderful map, the sort one often sees framed and hanging on the wall in a study full of plush chairs and stained-glass lamps: painstakingly lettered, researched down to the last pebble and participle, drawn with dash and flair, with cloud-goddesses in the corners and giant squid squirming up out of the sea...[T]here are more maps in the world than anyone can count. Every person draws a map that shows themselves at the center.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Boy Who Lost Fairyland