Top 500 Catherynne M. Valente Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “I am a practical girl, and a life is only so long. It should be spent in as much peace and good eating and good reading as possible and no undue excitement. That is all I am after.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

103. “That’s what happens to friends, eventually. They leave you. It’s practically what they’re for.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

111. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

118. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

120. “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

121. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

123. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

129. “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

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— 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. “It’s saying no. That’s your first hint that something’s alive. It says no. That’s how you know a baby is starting to turn into a person. They run around saying no all day, throwing their aliveness at everything to see what it’ll stick to. You can’t say no if you don’t have desires and opinions and wants of your own. You wouldn’t even want to. No is the heart of thinking.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

138. “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

139. “Folk dress in all manner of finery and wonderful hats to go and watch the races, but only if it’s horses doing the barreling that day. This, at least, is understandable, for horses, in secret, love hats more than any other creature. It is a horse’s tragedy that they can never properly wear one.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

140. “You humans, you know, whoever built you sewed irony into your sinews.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

141. “How else are you supposed to deal with people who like terrible things? Hit them with a shovel till they stop, that’s how.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

142. “I look at you, Masha, and it is like drinking cold water. I look at you and it is like my throat being cut.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

143. “As you swallow the cow’s tongue, think for a moment about how strange and holy that is, to devour the tongue of another. To steal from it all its power to speak, to low at the moon, to call to its calf. To be worthy of such food you must guard your own words carefully, speaking only the wise and clever ones, lest your tongue end up likewise, on the plate of a rich man.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

144. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

147. “Life is like that. Death sweeps it away. That’s what death is for. That’s why they keep telling this story. It’s the only story.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

148. “Those were all big words, to be sure, but as has been said, September read often, and liked it best when words did not pretend to be simple, but put on their full armor and rode out with colors flying.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

149. “How long was it, between the time when you were happy, and the time when you wanted to kill him?”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente