Top 500 Catherynne M. Valente Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “That’s how kings are made, my brush-tailed girl – they pick a place, shove a stick in it, call themselves King and wait to see if someone gets angry about it. No one has gotten angry so far, so that makes the otters mine.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

452. “She had a highly developed sense of humor which in some lights looked a bit like a sense of justice.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

453. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

455. “Sometimes I am a cicada, hissing and singing in the leaves of a tree by the sunlit water, thoughtless and wordless, a voice that is all consonants and tribal clicks. Sometimes I rub my legs together like a string bass, and the lake quivers.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

456. “For when a box is shut, you cannot tell what it might contain, so you might as well say it contains everything, because, really, it could contain anything, see? But when you open it, you affect what is inside. Observing something changes it, that’s a law, nothing to be done.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

457. “Do you know what a thirteen-year-old girl can do when she is alone and frightened and believes she is right?”

— Catherynne M. Valente

458. “But I am a sly and wicked narrator. If there is a secret to be plumbed for your benefit, Dear Reader, I shall strap on a head-lamp and a pick-ax and have at it.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

459. “That’s how it goes – as soon as there’s anything interesting in Ancient Greece, some arsehole with a magic hat comes along to murder it.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

460. “Mabry Muscat looked pleadingly at Mallow, and she could not understand why they all obeyed him – except that of course the King could eat them, and of course he was King, and did not people everywhere do more or less as they were told when someone with a crown did the telling?”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

462. “What’s the difference between being dead and having a boyfriend? Death sticks around.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

463. “And my cases end like all stories end: with a sunset, and a kiss, and redemption, and iron shoes, and a sear of light from the shadows, a gun-muzzle flash that illuminates everything as the rain just keeps coming down in the motley, several-colored light of the back end of the world.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

465. “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

466. “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

467. “What was magical at two in the morning was tawdry and cheap and dangerous to your health at two in the afternoon.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

468. “Eternity takes forever. The infinite expanse of time just does not know when to quit.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

469. “I believe we have an utterly unique specimen on our hands: a child who listens.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

470. “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

471. “Twelve mothers and twelve fathers were stacked into the long, thin house, each with four children, drawing the old cobalt-and-silver curtains down the center of rooms to make labyrinths of twelve dining rooms, twelve stting rooms, twelve bedrooms. It could be said, and was, that Marya Morevna had twelve mothers and twelve fathers, and so did all the children of that long, thin house.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

472. “It is best in the end to let women see to their own vengeance.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

473. “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

474. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

477. “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

478. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

482. “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

483. “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

484. “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

485. “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

486. “Endings are lush and lascivious, Vince; they call to me. All spread out on satin inevitabilities, waiting, beckoning, promising impossibly, obscenely elegant solutions – if you’ve been a good lad and dressed the house just so, for its comfort, for its arousal. All the rest of the nonsense a story requires is must a long seduction of the ending.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

487. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

490. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

493. “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

494. “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

495. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

497. “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

498. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

500. “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