Six-Gun Snow White Quotes

“This is what it means to be a woman in this world. Every step is a bargain with pain. Make your black deals in the black wood and decide what you’ll trade for power. For the opposite of weakness, which is not strength but hardness. I am a trap, but so is everything. Pick your price. I am a huckster with a hand in your pocket. I am freedom and I will eat your heart.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White

“I thought: this is how you make a human being. A human being is beautiful and sick. A human being glitters and starves.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White

“I had some peculiar ideas about love. I’ll tell you what I thought on the subject back then: it’s about as much use as a barrel with no bottom. When I fed the pigs and two of them got to scrapping over an old soft onion, I thought: that’s love. Love is eating. Love is a snarling pig snout and long tusks. Love is a dress like the sun. Love is the color of blood. Love is what grown folk do to each other because the law frowns on killing.

I said I loved her back. I put my hand on the door and I said I loved her back and when I said it I thought of kissing her and also of shooting her through the eye.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White

“Maybe it’s not a lesson so much as it’s a magic trick. You can make a little girl into anything if you say the right words. Take her apart until all that’s left is her red, red heart thumping against the world. Stitch her up again real good. Now, maybe you get a woman. If you’re lucky. If that’s what you were after. Just as easy to end up with a blackbird or a circus bear or a coyote. Or a parrot, just saying what’s said to you, doing what’s done to you, copying until it comes so natural that even when you’re all alone you keep on cawing hello pretty bird at the dark.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White

“The worst thing in the world is having to go back to the dark you shook off.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White

“You ain't no woodstove; you can't just squat in the middle of my house and stew.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White

“Love was a magic fairy spell. Didn't the girls in my books hunt after love like it was a deer with a white tail? Didn't love wake the dead? Didn't that lady love the beast so hard he turned into a good-looking white fellow? That was what love did. It turned you into something else.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White

“Let me tell you something, kid," said Mrs. H of Boston and Beacon Hill. "Magic is just a word for what's left to the powerless once everyone else has eaten their fill.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White

“You may not know it but the keeping of a large house by one girl is the hardest work going on earth. I heard there's fire in hell but I'll bet the Devil just hands you a bucket and tells you to get moving, this place ain't gonna clean itself.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White

“Your past's a private matter, sweetheart. You just keep it locked up in xbox where it can't hurt anyone.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White

“Listen, girl, I came to tell you that life is stupid. It just pulls the same shit over and over. Sometimes you think you can make it come out different, but you can't. You're in a story and the body writing it is an asshole.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White

“Life’s still stupid but we got free of story out here under the beeches and the Big Dipper. We had enough of it, of things happening one after another and no end in sight. Of reversals and falling in love and tragic flaws, and by God if I see another motif in my business I will shoot it dead.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White

“Some things a girl has in her to say no to and some things cut her down before she knows she’s gone. Sure, some twiggy, thorny snap in her says: no, this is awry, this is a bent thing, in that place that tells her to belly up to the floor before anyone’s even shadowed the doorframe. But it don’t matter. You can’t ask why she did it, when she was warned, when she was told. The plum truth is you would too, if everything impossible stood out there saying you could be loved so perfect the past would go up like a firecracker and shatter across the dark.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White

“You're grown--crooked and backbent, but grown--and it's time to stop hanging your heart on your mother.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White

“The dude feels right fatherly. Takes her down to the crick to wash the underground off of her. Just can't bring himself to shoot her while she's filthy and starving. There's time. Offers her a cake of French-milled soap he brought all the way out from Chicago. Smells like gardenias if you know your flowers, and the dude does. Snow White knows something's skewed but she grabs it, strips off like it's nothing and climbs in the water. She don't shiver even though that stream has to be as cold as a wagon tire. The miner's crud comes off her in black ribbons. The duded watches another girl come out of the blind mole-skin she was walking around it. This one has muscles like a mountain cat and a kind of pretty he doesn't know what to do with. For fairness he'd take her stepmother six days and twice on Sunday. The beauty Snow White's got has nothing to do with him. She's scarred up and suspicious an shameless. Her pretty's not for him. It's like saying the moon's got a fine figure on her. Maybe true, but what good is that to a man?”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White

“A mother's like a poison made for only one soul.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White

“Love is what grown folk do to each other because the law frowns on killing. I”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White

“What happens to the West happens to Snow White, which is to say they both turn into jokes.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White

“Opium ain’t got nothing on the promise of tomorrow turning up better than today. Snow”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White

“I expect everyone in Boston has something like that ring, which is why I am glad I have never been to Boston.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White

“A body can only deliver up the truth its bones know, Its blood, which is its history.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White

“Maybe [Snow White] never wakes up. More likely than anything else, really. You can’t kiss a girl into anything.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White

“I opened my door and everything they had for me was tainted because the land of Used-to-Be is just full of ghosts starving for your breath.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White

“Of course she cheated. Don't be silly. Snow White spent half her growing years shuffling cards for no one. She can cut false and she can cut true, but she wasn't going to lose when it counted.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White

“Snow White swallows that like a sword. She lets the hammer click back into place. Everything in her that's not nailed down is shaking loose.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White

“You can’t kiss a girl into anything.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White

“I heard there’s fire in hell, but I’ll bet the devil just hands you a bucket and tells you to get moving, this place ain’t gonna clean itself.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White

“Your past’s a private matter, sweetheart. You just keep it locked up in a box where it can’t hurt anyone.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White

“Magic is just a word for what’s left to the powerless once everyone else has eaten their fill.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White

“You can make a little girl into anything if you say the right words. Take her apart until all that’s left is her red, red heart thumping against the world. Stitch her up again real good. Now, maybe you get a woman. If you’re lucky. If that’s what you were after. Just as easy to end up with a blackbird or a circus bear or a coyote. Or a parrot, just saying what’s said to you, doing what’s done to you, copying until it comes so natural that even when you’re all alone you keep cawing hello pretty bird at the dark.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White