Top 500 Catherynne M. Valente Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “I am the Walker and the Maze.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

104. “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

105. “Men, they feel nothing like what we must endure. You have to make room in yourself for him, and that is the same in a house as in a body. See that you keep some rooms in yourself, locked up tight.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

106. “Seraphim, you understand? Not frilly angels with blousy pink wings and haloes like wedding rings. These ones had wheels full of eyes and voices like the noise of the deep.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

107. “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

108. “I abandoned her. It’s the one capital crime of fatherhood. Mothers can fail a thousand different ways. A father’s only job is: do not abandon this child.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

109. “It takes energy for new roads to diverge in new woods, and no energy is spent with complete efficiency, without waste. Where wood has burned, there will be ash. The waste product of the constantly dividing multiverse is a fine, drifting mist of regret, and no wormhole has ever starved.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

110. “I do not tolerate a world emptied of you. I have tried. For a year I have called every black tree Marya Morevna; I have looked for your face in the patterns of the ice. In the dark, I have pored over the loss of you like pale gold.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

111. “Clothes are a story you choose to tell about yourself, a different one every day.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

112. “You can be innocent again. It’s not true, what they say, that you can never get it back. You can. It’s only that most folk cannot be bothered.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

113. “Well enough. I won’t ask you if your love is true or any of that rot – it’s not my place to judge. After all, I’m a naked woman chained to a wall; I’ve no business questioning the lifestyles of wine-makers or anyone else.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

114. “And it’s the wonders I’m after, even if I have to bleed for them.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

115. “Marya Morevna! Don’t you know anything? Girls must be very, very careful to care only for ribbons and magazines and wedding rings. They must sweep their hearts clean of anything but kisses and theater and dancing. They must never read Pushkin; they must never say clever things; they must never have sly eyes or wear their hair loose and wander around barefoot, or they will draw his attention!”

— Catherynne M. Valente

116. “And that is the last lesson of childhood: You spend all your years fighting against the injustice of big folk and their big rules until you are ready to rule yourself.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

117. “Truly, Autumn is my season,” the scarlet beast chorted. “Spring and Summer and Winter all begin with such late letters! But Autumn and Fall, I have loved best, because they are best to love.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

118. “She walks into my life legs first, a long drink of water in the desert of my thirties. Her shoes are red; her eyes are green. She’s an Italian flag in occupied territory, and I fall for her like Paris. She mixes my metaphors like a martini and serves up my heart tartare. They all do. Every time. They have to. It’s that kind of story.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

119. “But if you must be clever, then be clever. Be brave. Sleep with fists closed and shoot straight.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

120. “A tale may have exactly three beginnings: one for the audience, one for the artist, and one for the poor bastard who has to live in it.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

121. “Perhaps all a Tsaritsa is is a beautiful cold girl in the snow, looking down at someone wretched, and not yielding.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

122. “You can’t trust just any old person who comes along with a hundred puffins and a pretty face!”

— Catherynne M. Valente

123. “Ceno’s brain, soft and pink with blood – and veined with endless whorls and branches of sapphire threaded through every synapse and neuron, inextricable, snarled, intricate, terrible, fragile and new.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

124. “And as we watched, the Tsar of Death lifted up his eyelids like skirts and began to dance in the streets of Leningrad.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

125. “What matters is entertainment. Eternity takes forever. The infinite expanse of time just does not know when to quit. The dead fear boredom the way mortals fear death.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

126. “Love is what grown folk do to each other because the law frowns on killing. I.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

127. “Marya pinned out her childhood like a butterfly. She considered it the way a mathematician considers an equation.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

128. “But the trick most folk are so awfully fond of learning, the absolute second they’ve got hold of a heart, is to pretend they don’t have one at all. It is the very first danger of the hearted.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

129. “Once there was a girl who ate an apple not meant for her... Up until the apples, she had been living in a wonderful house in the wilderness, happy in her fate and her ways. She had seven aunts and seven uncles and a postdoctorate in anthropology.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

130. “Surely you didn’t think deathless meant dickless.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

131. “English loves to stay out all night dancing with other languages, all decked out in sparkling prepositions and irregular verbs. It is unruly and will not obey – just when you think you have it in hand, it lets down its hair along with a hundred nonsensical exceptions.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

132. “One of the awful secrets of seventeen is that it still has seven hiding inside it. Sometimes seven comes tumbling out, even when seventeen wants to be Grown-Up and proud. This is also one of the awful secrets of seventy.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

133. “Buck up, baby blowfish. Just puff up bigger than your sadness and scare it right off. That’s the only way to live in the awful old ocean.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

134. “All Librarians are Secret Masters of Severe Magic. Goes with the territory.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

135. “I will see him with his skin off before I agree to fall in love.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

136. “The future is a messy, motley business, little girl.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

137. “Names aren’t loners, they’re connected, even in real life. You name your kids for someone dead or what you hope they will become or what you wish you were and your parents did the same to you and that big, glittering net of names tells the story of the whole world. Names are load-bearing struts. Names are destiny.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

138. “You are not the chosen one, September. Fairyland did not choose you – you chose yourself.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

139. “There must be blood, the girl thought. There must always be blood. The Green Wind said that, so it must be true. It will be all hard and bloody, but there will be wonders, too, or else why bring me here at all? And it’s the wonders I’m after, even if I have to bleed for them.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

140. “Life is beautiful and life is stupid. This is, in fact, widely regarded as a universal rule not less inviolable than the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Uncertainty Principle, and No Post on Sundays. As long as you keep that in mind, and never give more weight to one than the other, the history of the galaxy is a simple tune with lyrics flashed on-screen and a helpful, friendly bouncing disco ball of all-annihilating flames to help you follow along.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

141. “I’ve always had enough, even if my enough and your enough are as different as an elephant and a minaret.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

142. “She certainly did not see Death stand on her tiptoes and blow a kiss after her, a kiss that rushed through all the frosted leaves of the autumnal forest but could not quite catch a child running as fast as she could. As all mothers know, children travel faster than kisses. The speed of kisses is, in fact, what Doctor Fallow would call a cosmic constant. The speed of children has no limits.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

143. “As all mothers know, children travel faster than kisses. The speed of kisses is, in fact, what Doctor Fallow would call a cosmic constant. The speed of children has no limits.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

144. “Did I not come to you on my knees with a kingdom in my hand?”

— Catherynne M. Valente

145. “Sometimes, magic is like that. It lands on your head like a piano, a stupid, ancient, unfunny joke, and you spend the rest of your life picking sharps and flats out of your hair.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

146. “I perceive that you have a cruel heart, my child. It lies within your breast like a smoldering blade, hissing steam at me.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

147. “She who invented words, and yet does not speak; she who brings dreams and visions, yet does not sleep; she who swallows the storm, yet knows nothing of rain or wind. I speak for her; I am her own.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

148. “No, love, in real life you can get all the way to death and never have finished one single story.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

149. “We are halves, but we make an infinite whole.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

150. “Think about it, mate: How could a species like that develop the massive technology you need to achieve faster-than-light interstellar travel, yeah? All they do is hunt and eat. They’re just stupid murderlumps or killbots supreme with a side of zombie-mayonnaise. Where’s the nerdy shy Predator scientist who figured out how to build a spaceship while all the big jock Predators were down the pub ripping one another’s spines out, eh? Nowhere, because she don’t exist.”

— Catherynne M. Valente