Top 500 Catherynne M. Valente Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

55. “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

56. “If you want to kill yourself, do not use us as your knife.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

57. “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

58. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

60. “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

61. “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

62. “Old things have strange hungers.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

69. “But Fairyland is an old place, and old things have strange hungers.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

77. “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

78. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

80. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

82. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

84. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

87. “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

88. “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

89. “When one is traveling, everything looks brighter and lovelier. That does not mean it IS brighter and lovelier; it just means that sweet, kindly home suffers in comparison to tarted-up foreign places with all their jewels on.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

90. “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

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. “What is the world but a boxing ring where fools and devils put up their fists?”

— Catherynne M. Valente

93. “So much light, sweet girl, begins in the dark.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

94. “Family is a transitive property.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

95. “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

96. “I am the Walker and the Maze.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

97. “If I stop, I shall sink and die. That’s the way I’m made. I have to keep going always, and even when I get where I’m going, I’ll have to keep on. That’s living.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

98. “September had never been betrayed before. She did not even know what to call the feeling in her chest, so bitter and sour. Poor child. There is always a first time, and it is never the last time.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

99. “Never trust anyone under one hundred!”

— Catherynne M. Valente

100. “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