Top 500 Catherynne M. Valente Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “After love, no one is what they were before.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

2. “She is so stubborn, her heart has an argument with her head every time it wants to beat.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

3. “Everyone is a criminal! We are beset on all sides by antirevolutionary forces. Naturally, then, humans fall into three categories: the criminal, the not-yet-criminal, and the not-yet-caught.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

4. “She was beautiful and terrifying, savage and pure.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

5. “A library is never complete. That’s the joy of it. We are always seeking one more book to add to our collection.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

6. “Never put your faith in a Prince. When you require a miracle, trust in a Witch.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

7. “I am selfish. I am cruel. My mate cannot be less than I.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

8. “We all have someone we think shines so much more than we do that we are not even a moon to their sun, but a dead little rock floating in space next to their gold and their blaze.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

9. “Fierce was her needle, and she wore it like a sword.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

10. “But her heart was so cold that she could hold ice in her mouth and it would never melt.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

11. “A book is a door, you know. Always and forever. A book is a door into another place and another heart and another world.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

12. “How I adore you, Marya. How well I chose. Scold me; deny me. Tell me you want what you want and damn me forever. But don’t leave me.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

13. “You will always fall in love, and it will always be like having your throat cut, just that fast.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

14. “A labyrinth, when it is big enough, is just the world.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

15. “It is such hard work to keep your heart hidden! And worse, by the time you find it easy, it will be harder still to show it. It is a terrible magic in this world to ask for exactly the thing you want. Not least because to know exactly the thing you want and look it in the eye is a long, long labor.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

16. “You’re not in love if you keep your own heart bricked up behind your bones. You’re only playing.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

17. “Death hath no dominion.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

18. “I have survived, but I have not been spared.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

19. “Bad luck relies on absolutely perfect timing.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

20. “Life is beautiful and life is stupid. As long as you keep that in mind, and never give more weight to one than the other, the history of the galaxy, the history of a planet, the history of a person is a simple tune with lyrics flashed on-screen and a helpful, friendly bouncing disco ball of glittering, occasionally peaceful light to help you follow along. Cue the music. Cue the dancers. Cue tomorrow.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

21. “Old things have strange hungers.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

22. “Metamorphosis is the most profound of all acts.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

23. “Hats have power. Hats can change you into someone else.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

24. “If you want to kill yourself, do not use us as your knife.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

25. “Coffee is a kind of magic you can drink.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

26. “Time is no one’s friend – time has no social niceties and holds the door for nobody nowhere. But I hold the door for time, with my one good paw.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

27. “But Fairyland is an old place, and old things have strange hungers.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

28. “I’m not lost, because I haven’t any idea where to go that I might get lost on the way to. I’d like to get lost, because then I’d know where I was going, you see.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

29. “For the wishes of one’s old life wither and shrivel like old leaves if they are not replaced with new wishes when the world changes. And the world always changes. Wishes get slimy, and their colors fade, and soon they are just mud, like all the rest of the mud, and not wishes at all, but regrets. The trouble is, not everyone can tell when they ought to launder their wishes.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

30. “The only question is this: Do you have enough empathy and yearning and desperation to connect to others outside yourself and scream into the void in four-part harmony?”

— Catherynne M. Valente

31. “Because the opposite of fascism isn’t anarchy, it’s theater.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

32. “A thing too familiar becomes invisible.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

33. “At the bottom of philosophy something very true and very desperate whispers: Everyone is hungry all the time. Everyone is starving. Everyone wants so much, much more than they can stomach, but the appetite doesn’t converse much with the stomach. Everyone is hungry and not only for food – for comfort and love and excitement and the opposite of being alone. Almost everything awful anyone does is to get those things and keep them.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

34. “I know you loved both he and I, the way a mother can love two sons. And no one should be judged for loving more than they ought, only for loving not enough.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

35. “September could see it. She did not know what is was she saw. That is the disadvantage of being a heroine, rather than a narrator. She knew only that a red light glowed and went dark, glowed and went dark.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

36. “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

37. “Life is beautiful and life is stupid. This is, in fact, widely regarded as a universal rule not less inviolable than the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Uncertainty Principle, and No Post on Sundays.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

38. “She did not want to read this book from start to finish, or rather, she thought perhaps it did not want her to. Instead she practiced the art of bibliomancy, trusting the book to show her what it wanted her to know.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

39. “However unlikely it may seem, it is the truth and, therefore, one hundred percent likely.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

40. “The worst thing in the world is having to go back to the dark you shook off.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

41. “Mug your destiny in an alley and punch it until it gives you what you want.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

42. “The world had gotten gritty enough. The only thing left to do in all that dirt was to shine.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

43. “Are you kind enough, on your little planet, not to shut that rhythm down? Not to crush underfoot the singers of songs and tellers of tales and wearers of silk? Because it’s monsters who do that. Who extinguish art. Who burn books. Who ban music. Who yell at anyone with ears to turn off that racket. Who cannot see outside themselves clearly enough to sing their truth to the heavens. Do you have enough goodness in your world to let the music play? Do you have soul?”

— Catherynne M. Valente

44. “Remember, pain is not a test. Knowledge is not enough.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

45. “You are a Witch. I am a Prince. In all the books, where there is a Witch and a Prince there is a way.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

46. “No matter how mad, bad, and dangerous to know a civilization gets, unto every generation are born the lonely and the uncool, destined to forever stare into the candy-store window of their culture, and loneliness is the mother of ascension. Only the uncool have the requisite alone time to advance their species.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

47. “Stories have a way of changing faces. They are unruly things, undisciplined, given to delinquency and the throwing of erasers. This is why we must close them up into thick, solid books, so they cannot get out and cause trouble.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

48. “The best way to be the kind of girl you want to be is to do what that girl would do.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

49. “We like the wrong sorts of girls, they wrote. They are usually the ones worth writing about.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

50. “It is important to announce your intentions at top volume, she thought, or your intentions will think you are ashamed of them.”

— Catherynne M. Valente