Top 500 Catherynne M. Valente Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Love, I’ve never been anyone’s mother; I don’t know how to talk to young or old. But don’t stop smiling just because I flap my mouth and say something that’s not dressed around the edges like a lace tablecloth. Thicken up and we’ll get along fine.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

152. “Finally, she said: “I’m lonely” – it’s weird but you tell the wolves things, sometimes. You can’t help it, all these old wounds come open and suddenly you’re confessing to a wolf who never says anything back. She said: “I’m lonely,” and they ate her in the street.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

153. “Things that cannot long be kept secret: death in the family, the loss of a ring, corruption of the spirit, boredom, illicit love. Sickness. Addiction. Pregnancy.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

156. “Rules are for those who can’t think of a better way.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

157. “Her heart ached as though a knife had quietly slipped between her ribs.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

159. “If one did not have at least a little luck, one would never survive childhood. But luck can be spent, like money; and lost, like a memory; and wasted, like a life.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

160. “I can’t imagine a decent maze that would be caught dead without a minotaur. It’s not done! You don’t go out of your house without any clothes on, and a minotaur doesn’t go into the world without a labyrinth to keep him warm.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

161. “I used to look up at night and dream of the solar system. I know, I know – who didn’t? But your own dreams seem so special, so terribly yours, until you grow up and figure out they’re just like everyone else’s. How perfect and beautiful and silent and dead each planet hung in my heart! All nine names, written in squiggly, shaky handwriting, glowing inside me.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

162. “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

163. “Just tell yourself a story that’ll satisfy you and pretend he told it.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

164. “It is true that novelists are shameless and obey no decent law, and they are not to be trusted on any account, but some Mysteries even they must honor.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

165. “We all live inside the terrible engine of authority, and it grinds and shrieks and burns so that no one will say: lines on maps are silly.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

166. “She’s an Italian flag in occupied territory, and I fall for her like Paris.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

167. “An equation is a prophecy that always comes true.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

168. “He missed you like a fish in a bowl misses the open sea.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

169. “We have all of us got it jumbled up. You never feel so grown up as when you are eleven, and never so young and unsure as when you are forty. That is why time is a rotten jokester and no one ought to let him in to dinner.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

170. “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

171. “In war you must always choose sides. One or the other. Silver or black. Human or demon. If you try to be a bridge laid down between them, they will tear you in half.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

172. “Now, there are important rules in Fairyland, rules from which I shall one day be exempt, when my papers have been processed at last and I am possessed of the golden ring of diplomatic immunity.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

173. “She liked anything orange: leaves; some moons; marigolds; chrysanthemums; cheese; pumpkin, both in pie and out; orange juice; marmalade. Orange is bright and demanding. You can’t ignore orange things. She once saw an orange parrot in the pet store and had never wanted anything so much in her life. She would have named it Halloween and fed it butterscotch. Her mother said butterscotch would make a bird sick and, besides, the dog would certainly eat it up. September never spoke to the dog again – on principle.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

174. “Chyerti – that’s us, demons and devils, small and big – are compulsive. We obsess. It’s our nature. We turn on a track, around and around; we march in step; we act out the same tales, over and over, the same sets of motions, while time piles up like yarn under a wheel. We like patterns. They’re comforting. Sometimes little things change – a car instead of a house, a girl not named Yelena. But it’s no different, not really. Not ever.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

175. “Everything in creation is just a trick of the light – the only difference between heaven and hell is who’s running those lights, who’s got the switch, who knows the cues.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

176. “Husbands lie, Masha. I should know; I’ve eaten my share. That’s lesson one. Lesson number two: among the topics about which a husband is most likely to lie are money, drink, black eyes, political affiliation, and women who squatted on his lap before and after your sweet self.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

177. “Perhaps one was not meant to see what a husband looked like before he made himself more or less presentable. Perhaps the republic of husbands was a strange and frightening place full of not only birds, but bats too, and lizards, and bears, and worms, and other beasts waiting to fall out of a tree and into a wedding ring.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

178. “Your past’s a private matter, sweetheart. You just keep it locked up in xbox where it can’t hurt anyone.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

179. “But the Tsar of Death and the Tsar of Life greatly feared one another, for Death is surrounded by souls, and is never lonely, and the Tsar of Life had hidden his death away in a place deeper than secrets, and more secret than depth.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

180. “It’s different. When you make a house good and strong because it’s your house, a place you made, a place you’re proud of, it’s not at all the same as making it glow for someone who ordered you to do it.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

181. “You’re looking very fine tonight, Grandmother! Why, you’ve hardly any warts at all! Bathing in blood again, I’ll warrant. Virgins or capitalists this time?”

— Catherynne M. Valente

182. “How we would like to argue with September, and tell her that in the waiting lies the pleasure! That we here in the world of sensible folk know how to wait without twisted-up bellies and tapping feet and wishing for the sun to hurry up and rise and set. That a clever person is never bored, and a bored person is never clever. But though I am sly, I am a trickster, I am even cruel – I cannot lie.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

183. “No, not like this, when I have not seen you without your skin on, when I know nothing, when I am not safe. Not you, whose name all my nightmares know.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

184. “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

185. “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

186. “A prophetic world that can never come true.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

187. “She is dead. Almost certainly dead. Nearly conclusively dead. She is, at the very least, not answering her telephone.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

188. “It is a terrible magic in this world to ask for exactly the thing you want. Not least because to know exactly the thing you want and look it in the eye is a long, long labor.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

189. “I looked at this man and thought: Oh, how we are going to hurt each other.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

190. “In future days you will call John Mandeville a liar, and my shade will laugh at you and say: true, true, I was, but not always, not so. When the world was good enough in my sight, when it behaved as wildly and gorgeously as I always knew it could, I told the truth of it.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

191. “But lost children always find each other, in the dark, in the cold. It is as though they are magnetized, and can only attract their like.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

192. “Heroes in motion tend to stay in motion, but villains in motion tend toward mass destruction.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

193. “She’s an old woman possessed of great powers – but aren’t all old women possessed of great powers? Occupational hazard, I think.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

194. “All things are strange which are worth knowing.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

195. “Do you know, Masha, how revelation comes? Like death. So sudden, though you knew all along it must occur. A revelation is always the end of something. It might even be cause for grief.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

196. “I reminded myself: when a book lies unopened it might contain anything in the world, anything imaginable. It therefore, in that pregnant moment before opening, contains everything. Every possibility, both perfect and putrid. Surely such mysteries are the most enticing things You grant us in this mortal mere – the fruit in the garden, too, was like this. Unknown, and therefore infinite. Eve and her mate swallowed eternity, every possible thing, and made the world between them.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

197. “You’re better off – theatrical folk are nothing but a bundle of monologues and anxiety headaches.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

198. “Every morning she pulled a delicate cup from its brass hook and filled it, hoping that it would be dark and deep and secret as a forest, and each morning it cooled too fast, had too much milk, stained the cup, made her nervous.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

199. “That a clever person is never bored, and a bored person is never clever.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

200. “Where there is a Key, there is yet hope.”

— Catherynne M. Valente