Top 500 Catherynne M. Valente Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

2. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

4. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

6. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

9. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

11. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

15. “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

16. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

22. “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

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

26. “A thing too familiar becomes invisible.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

27. “Death hath no dominion.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

36. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

39. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

41. “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

42. “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

43. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

46. “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

47. “This is how you learn to see: You put together a crew. No one can see a damn thing clearly with only two eyes.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

48. “You couldn’t ever really fix a sad story. You could only make another. And another. And another, until you found the right one at last, the one that ends in joy.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

49. “Music has more rules than math or magic and it’s twice as dangerous as both or either.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

50. “Narrators may go where they please.”

— Catherynne M. Valente