Top 500 Catherynne M. Valente Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “The tales lovers tell each other about how they met are hushed and secret things. They change year by year, for we all meet many times as we grow up and become different and new and exciting people – and this never stops, even for a minute, even when we are ninety.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

452. “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

453. “Everything in this place was livid and lurid and living, and when he loved her and hurt her all at once she lived, too, higher and harder than she had thought she could.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

454. “A body can only deliver up the truth its bones know, Its blood, which is its history.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

455. “She sounds like someone who spends a lot of time in libraries, which are the best sorts of people.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

456. “At the snowy summit of all these things, however, is the fact that you simply cannot go about locking your siblings in towers when they misbehave. It is unseemly and betrays a sad lack of creativity.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

457. “Whenever one does extraordinary things, someone is bound to try to repeat them for themselves. It’s the way of the world.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

458. “September had no natural defense against lost things, being one herself. She could not quite have put it into words, but she felt profoundly, at the bottom of her new, shining heart, that she could find lost things. She could make them un-lost if she were brave enough. After all, if enough lost things band together, even in the darkest depths, they aren’t really lost at all anymore.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

459. “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

460. “All our precontact simulations categorized you as a Down-to-Clown Unflappable Guy Who Can Handle This Sort of Thing No Problem with a high probability of Being Actually into It All the Way.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

461. “Any story told is a lie cunningly told to hide the real world from the poor bastards who live in it.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

462. “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

463. “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

464. “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

465. “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

466. “I am sustained by Being Necessary.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

467. “Do you think, if Columbus had stood on the bow of his ship, looked at the New World and understood everything to come, all the disease and death and betrayal, all the ugliness, all the blood – do you think he would have embraced it, called it paradise?”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

473. “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

474. “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

475. “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

476. “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

477. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

480. “Opium ain’t got nothing on the promise of tomorrow turning up better than today. Snow.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

481. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

484. “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

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. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

488. “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

489. “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

490. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

492. “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

493. “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

494. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

496. “No one is a cup for another to drink from.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

497. “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

498. “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

499. “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

500. “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