Top 500 Catherynne M. Valente Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “She had a highly developed sense of humor which in some lights looked a bit like a sense of justice.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

452. “The tyrannosaurus looked a little shamefaced – but only a little, for dinosaurs would rather drown in tar than admit they’re wrong. That unfortunate attitude played a key role in their extinction.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

453. “Americans all acted like they were trying to pretend they hadn’t just chased a fistful of ecstasy with a noseful of coke to save themselves from a police officer only they could see.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

454. “The Land of Parents is strange and full of peril.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

455. “She got, instead, a towering confection that might have thought about becoming a sandwich at one point, but had gotten greater ambitions along the way.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

456. “The Sirens flicked their wings at the wall, inscribing it with their own blue ink: Even in penance is beauty; blessed are all the ocean’s drowned!”

— Catherynne M. Valente

457. “I’m quite civilized, I promise,’ Manythanks sniffed, smiling. ‘Wairwulves are cultured. We have choirs and charity races and rotary clubs. It’s when we’re human that you must take care.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

458. “I don’t see where you get off fretting about whether or not the end of the world is family-friendly.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

459. “But the story is no good without a villain. It can’t feel true without a villain. Otherwise, everything would already be as it ought to be, yes? Someone has to be at fault. And if you are the hero, it stands to reason that folk who do not look like you or talk like you or like to eat the same things you like to eat must be the villains. After all, the world is easy and simple, is it not?”

— Catherynne M. Valente

460. “A body is never so vicious as when it has only itself to blame for its trouble.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

461. “Kick-starting the gas-guzzling subcompact go-cart of organic sentience is as easy as shoving it down a hill and watching the whole thing spontaneously explode.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

462. “And there’s nothing wrong with spinsters, anyway. They have nice cats and little bowls full of candy. Mrs. Bailey and Mrs. Newitz are the kindest ladies you’ll ever meet, and they have nips of whiskey in their tea like cowboys.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

463. “I was happy, the sun was high. I had enough.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

464. “Do you think I am a fool, Masha? All this time, and you speak to me as though I were a flighty pinprick of a girl. I am a magician! Did you never think, even once, that I loved lipstick and rouge for more than their color alone? I am a student of their lore, and it is arcane and hermetic beyond the dreams of alchemists. Did you never wonder why I gave you so many pots, so many creams, so much perfume?”

— Catherynne M. Valente

465. “Everyone cried when the creature first spoke to them. No, not cried. They wept. They wept like the cavemen of Lascaux suddenly transported into the Sistine Chapel just in time for a live performance of Phantom of the Opera as sung by Tolkien’s elves.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

466. “A house is a kind of box you put a girl in.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

467. “Just slip on something black and low-cut, carve yourself the biggest goddamn slice of whatever cake they said you couldn’t have, and be a VILLAIN for a night! Come on. You know they deserve it. You know they ALL deserve it. What’s the use of all that rage you got if you don’t take it out for spin?”

— Catherynne M. Valente

468. “How much better if life were more like books, if life lied a little more, and gave up its stubborn and boring adherence to the way things can be, and thought a little more imaginatively about the way things might be.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

469. “Hearts set about finding other hearts the moment they are born, and between them, they weave nets so frightfully strong and tight that you end up bound forever in hopeless knots, even to the shadow of a beast you knew and loved long ago.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

470. “What was a person, if not the things they knew and the face they wore?”

— Catherynne M. Valente

471. “I savor bitterness – it is born of experience. It is the privilege of one who has truly lived.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

472. “Autumn is the very soul of metamorphosis, a time when the world is poised at the door of winter – which is the door of death – but has not yet fallen. It is a world of contradictions: a time of harvest and plenty but also of cold and hardship. Here we dwell in the midst of life, but we know most keenly that all things must pass away and shrivel. Autumn turns the world from one thing into another. The year is seasoned and wise but not yet decrepit or senile.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

473. “When you argue with verve in your saddlebags, you are extremely alive. That is why you yell and holler and shake your fist – could there be anything sweeter than convincing someone to see the world your way? What else is talking for, or jokes, or stories, or battles? The Loudest Magic, and how I loved it.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

474. “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. Even when one finds oneself in Fairyland and not at home at all, it is not always so easy to remember to catch the world in it’s changing and change with it.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

475. “Goblins are well-rounded, though you’d never think it from the dastard tales folk tell of us. For example, I enjoy stamp collecting as well as haggling.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

476. “You see her as you see anyone in this world: distorted, warped, reflected, refracted, contorted, mutilated by time.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

477. “When you are this hungry, you cannot even remember who you used to be, she whispered. Who you might have been, if not for the hunger.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

478. “Up to no good may mean up to something interesting!”

— Catherynne M. Valente

479. “When one is traveling, everything looks brighter and lovelier.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

480. “And the funny, impish magic of a wrap party is that everyone still has scraps of their characters hanging off them like Salome’s veils, fluttering, fading, but not quite finished tangling the tongue and tripping the feet. You’re not in Wonderland anymore, but you positively reek of rabbit.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

481. “We hold demonstrations and civil wars when inequities are discovered.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

482. “It is not so easy to always remember who you are.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

483. “She said you’d come and I swore to eat your heart.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

484. “Wife sounded like something exciting, something daring, something a bit scoundrelly, like pirate or bandit. And they were bandits, of course.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

485. “The Fairies called it a paw because they wanted to believe I was an animal-and not the sort of animal that discusses junkyard philosophy and enjoys Turkish coffee and knows Bone Magic and holds down a mortgage, no, the kind you can cut up for meat and only feel bad about it on Fridays. It’s easier to use somebody if you can think of them as mute and dumb and made for your pleasure.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

486. “It’s the most marvelous and terrible thing in the world. Everyone, but everyone, is pretending to be someone else.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

487. “He didn’t even know how to talk about it. He had practiced not talking about the things he knew until no man could be called his equal.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

488. “She was... unhappy. It was part of her, you could not separate her from it. She was sad the way a horse is strong or a bird flies.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

489. “The Leucrotta looked appraisingly at Leander for a long while. “My skin, you say? I had not heard that it had any medicinal value, but if the Witch needs it, I must, as a gentleman and a monster, yield to her.” Both the Prince and the King started, shocked at the suggestion. “But we must have a battle!” insisted the Prince. “Don’t be ridiculous, boy. I would eviscerate you within a minute. Just take the skin and scurry back.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

490. “However wretched her origins, she chose freely to continue her crimes against us from the moment she woke to this life. It is easy to forgive beautiful women, especially when they lay a sorrowful tale before you like a sugar-dusted meal. It does not mean they deserve forgiveness.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

491. “I could not say what creeps and whispers through the branches and down the threaded Road, but I hear it, and I am not afraid.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

492. “September smiled at her wonderful friends in all their colors and bright eyes and gentle ways. “You know, in Fairyland-Above they said that the underworld was full of devils and dragons. But it isn’t so at all! Folk are just folk, wherever you go, and it’s only a nasty sort of person who thinks a body’s a devil just because they come from another country and have different notions.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

493. “I will always be here, in my old chair by the door, waiting for you, whenever you are lonesome. Our little house will always look just the same as when we first blew the dust off the bookshelves, and the kettle will always be just about to boil. Sometimes I will be young, and sometimes I will be old, sometimes you will be young, and sometimes you will be old. But for as long as forever, I will keep a room for you. I swear by the sparkle in my eye and the spring in your step.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

494. “8. Santa Claus is concerned about the problem of Arctic ice. The ice is the spouse of the elves, and she is sick. She is the primary source of their magic, as the elves cannot be separated from the place where they live. For many years now, this is all they have asked for for Christmas: that the ice should come back.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

495. “Anything is a poem if you say it often enough.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

496. “From that day forward she never used my name. Eventually I forgot it. Mrs. H called me something new. She named me cruel and smirking, she named me not for beauty or for cleverness or for sweetness. She named me a thing I could aspire to but never become, the one thing I was not and could never be: Snow White.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

497. “Human contact is a terrible drug. Sometimes, you’ll even take the hit you know is tainted. You can’t stop yourself. The need is too strong.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

498. “But you can’t ever imagine what you’re going to care about when you turn into the version of you that’s waiting on the other side of five years from now. That’s a stranger waiting to ambush you, and all you can do is plant your feet and try not to get thrown.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

499. “You only had to choose which me to talk to, for, you know, we all change our manners, depending on who has come to chat. One doesn’t behave at all the same way to a grandfather as to a bosom friend, to a professor as to a curious niece.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

500. “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