Top 500 Catherynne M. Valente Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “Strictly speaking,′ said the King of Fairies between mouthfuls, ‘I’m leasing you this food on a limited, bite-by-bite basis and a generous payment-deferral plan. I’d have thought someone would have told you about Fairy food. You always pay, lad. I’m not running a charity delicatessen.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

453. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

456. “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

457. “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

458. “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

459. “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

460. “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

461. “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

462. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

466. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

468. “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

469. “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

470. “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

471. “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

472. “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

473. “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

474. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

476. “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

477. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

479. “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

480. “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

481. “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

482. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

485. “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

486. “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

487. “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

488. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

490. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

494. “You know how questing goes. You can’t explain it to anyone else; it would be like telling them your dreams.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

495. “No one knows themselves very well. Who has the time these days? Have you been formally introduced to yourself? Made the effort to get to know your faults and your strengths, sit yourself down to tea and listen to all your troubles, answered the call when yourself falters? Then how can you say you know yourself in the least?”

— Catherynne M. Valente

496. “A map shows maybes.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

497. “All time is mean young man. It takes and does not give, it rushes when you wish it would linger and drags when you wish is would fly. It flows sullenly, only in one direction, when it might take a thousand turns. You cannot get anything back once time has taken it. Time cheats and steals and lies and kills. If anyone could arrest it, they would have time behind bars faster than you can check your watch.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

498. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

500. “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