He wanted to sink you in steaming water, and put into your ashen mouth a slice of thick bread with roe shining on it like rubies. He wanted to sink you in steaming water, and brush your hair, and make you well. But he could not. You were too far gone. So instead he and I held you between us and I fed you, I fed you like a chick. I chewed up stars and sunlight and the rind of the moon and vomited them back into you, the most wholesome food we have known since the youth of the world.
Deathless, Catherynne M. Valente

When Ivan returned from his work, he, too, often looked older. He ate his cutlets and bread silently, with a sullen kind of savagery, and with a sullen kind of savagery he wrapped Marya up in his body, and kissed all of the skin she had, and cursed her for not having more.
Deathless, Catherynne M. Valente

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.
Deathless, Catherynne M. Valente

And Marya turned. She saw a young man, but not so young, with a broad, sun-reddened face and dark gold hair, like a coin that has often changed hands.
Deathless, Catherynne M. Valente

Zemlehyeh looked more or less like what you would get if a particularly stunted and ugly oak tree had fallen passionately in love with a boulder and produced, at great cost to both, a single child.
Deathless, Catherynne M. Valente

You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should’ve behaved better.
Anne Lamott (via loveyourchaos)

some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice, some say in lists of 50 must read sci fi novels
@lavietidhar