Top 500 Catherynne M. Valente Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “The best way to be the kind of girl you want to be is to do what that girl would do.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

52. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

54. “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

55. “Narrators may go where they please.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

56. “Things I Will Try to Say More Often: Why? I love you. I’m sorry. May I have chocolate? Yes. yes. yes.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

57. “There is no end and no beginning. There is only we two, alone in the dark, for always.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

58. “You are going to break your promise. I understand. And I hold my hands over the ears of my heart, so that I will not hate you.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

59. “I burn, I freeze; I am never warm. I am rigid; I forgot softness because it did not serve me.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

60. “Do not ruin today with mourning tomorrow.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

61. “That’s Venus, September thought. She was the goddess of love. It’s nice that love comes on first thing in the evening, and goes out last in the morning. Love keeps the light on all night.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

62. “Every morning is a battle between the superego and the id, and I am a mere foot soldier with mud and a snooze button on her shield.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

63. “I will not let her speak because I love her, and when you love someone, you do not make them tell war stories. A war story is a black space. On the one side is before and on the other side is after, and what is inside belongs only to the dead.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

64. “September knew a number of curse words, most of which she heard the girls at school saying in the bathrooms, in hushed voices, as if the words could make things happen just by being spoken, as if they were fairy words, and had to be handled just so.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

65. “I am freedom and I will eat your heart.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

66. “It’s a fairy tale. A children’s story. Not a funny or silly one, but one with blood and death and horror, because that’s fairy tales, too. A kid got swallowed by a whale. A little Pinocchio. A little Caliban. It’s all there. And, you know, in a fairy tale, the maidens are never dead – not really. They’re just sleeping.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

67. “Shadows are where magic comes from. Your dark and dancing self, slipping behind and ahead and around, never quite looking at the sun.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

68. “All stories must end so, with the next tale winking out of the corners of the last pages, promising more, promising moonlight and dancing and revels, if only you will come back when spring comes again.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

69. “I wouldn’t even consider it if I were you. But then if I were you, I would not be me, and if I were not me, I would not be able to advise you, and if I were unable to advise you, you’d do as you like, so you might as well do as you like and have done with it.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

70. “Respect me. Be proud, and if you love me, a little afraid, because love so often looks like fear. We are alike. We are alike.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

71. “Koschei the Deathless made a face as he tasted the wine. “It is far too sweet. Comrade Stalin fears bitterness and has the tastes of a spoiled princess. I savor bitterness – it is born of experience. It is the privilege of one who has truly lived. You, too, must learn to prefer it. After all, when all else is gone, you may still have bitterness in abundance.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

72. “A silent Library is a sad Library. A Library without patrons on whom to pile books and tales and knowing and magazines full of up-to-the-minute politickal fashions and atlases and plays in pentameter! A Library should be full of exclamations!”

— Catherynne M. Valente

73. “Do you remember being born? Only a few can say they do and not be caught immediately in the lie, and most of them are wizards. I, of course, remember it perfectly. Certain benefits are granted to narrators as part of the hiring package, to compensate for our irregular hours and unsafe working conditions.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

74. “Will Hilt to hand yet be restored? Take me up, thy mother’s sword.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

75. “I wish you the best that can be hoped for, and no worse than can be expected.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

76. “No one is now what they were before the war. There’s just no getting any of it back.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

77. “Even if you’ve taken off every stitch of clothing, you still have your secrets, your history, your true name. It’s hard to be really naked. You have to work hard at it. Just getting into a bath isn’t being naked, not really. It’s just showing skin.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

78. “Forests have secrets,′ he said gently. ‘It’s practically what they’re for. To hide things. To separate one world from another.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

79. “Sweet as cherries, bright as berries, light of my moony sky.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

80. “He’ll burn you down like wax if you let him. You’ll think it’s love, when he dines on your heart. And maybe it will be.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

81. “Endings are rubbish. No such thing. Never has been, never will be. There is only the place where you choose to stop talking. Everything else goes on forever.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

82. “If I let him do this to me, what else will I allow? Anything, anything, anything.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

83. “Funny how “question” contains the word “quest” inside it, as though any small question asked is a journey through briars.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

84. “You were so near death that ghosts crowded around you, weeping silver tears, waiting for you with such smiles. You humans, you know, whoever built you sewed irony into your sinews.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

85. “I am the Walker and the Maze.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

86. “We all just keep moving, September. We keep moving until we stop.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

87. “So most people go around with grimy machinery, when all it would take is a bit of spit and polish to make them paladins once more, bold knights and true.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

88. “Magic does that. It wastes you away. Once it grips you by the ear, the real world gets quieter and quieter, until you can hardly hear it at all.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

89. “Never trust anyone under one hundred!”

— Catherynne M. Valente

90. “I am not a little girl anymore, dazzled by your magic. It is my magic, now, too.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

91. “Where I come from, some people wear fine suits just to ride on an Aeroplane – I suspect they think if they impress it enough it will be sure to carry them safely.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

92. “I said: I could be a wolf for you. I could put my teeth on your throat. I could growl. I could eat you whole. I could wait for you in the dark. I could howl against your hair.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

93. “There is no such thing as a good wife or a good husband. Only ones who bide their time.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

94. “It is well known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

Featured in: Reading Quotes

95. “And if they thought her aimless, if they thought her a bit mad, let them. It meant they left her alone. Marya was not aimless, anyway. She was thinking.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

96. “I wish for my child to have a mind as stark and wild as the winter, a spirit as clear and fine as my window, and a heart as red and open as my wounded hand.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

97. “I am Death,” said the creature. “I thought that was obvious.” “But you’re so small!” “Only because you are small. You are young and far from your Death, September, so I seem as anything would seem if you saw it from a long way off – very small, very harmless. But I am always closer than I appear. As you grow, I shall grow with you, until at the end, I shall loom huge and dark over your bed, and you will shut your eyes so as not to see me.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

98. “The smell of loving is a difficult one to describe, but if you think of the times when someone has held you close and made you safe, you will remember how it smells just as well as I do.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

99. “In both marriage and war you must cut up the things people say like a cake and eat only what you can stomach.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

100. “Family is a transitive property.”

— Catherynne M. Valente