Top 500 Catherynne M. Valente Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Did I not come to you on my knees with a kingdom in my hand?”

— Catherynne M. Valente

152. “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

153. “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

154. “I was used and tricked and thrown away, but I cannot be forgiven. It’s a funny thing. You go your whole life thinking you’re the protagonist, but really, you’re just the backstory. The boys shrug and go on, they fight and blow things up and half of them do much worse... and still get a key to the city, and eventually you’re just a story your high school boyfriend tells the kid he had with his new wife.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

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158. “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

159. “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

160. “First, the avid student must be aware that when the world was young it knew only seven things: water, life and death, salt, night, birds and the length of an hour.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

163. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

165. “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

166. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

168. “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

169. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

175. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

177. “He quirked an eyebrow briefly, slightly, in such a way that no one afterwards might be able to safely accuse him of having done it. Sei knew the look. Names are meaningless, plosives and breath, but those who liked the slope of her waist often made much of hers, which denoted purity, clarity – as though it had any more in the way of depth than others. They wondered, all of them, if she really was pure, as pure as her name announced her to be, all white banners and hymeneal grace.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

178. “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

179. “Punishment doesn’t mean you aren’t loved. On the contrary. You can only punish someone you love.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

180. “But in the end, all wars are more or less the same. If you dig down through the layers of caramel corn and peanuts and choking, burning death, you’ll find the prize at the bottom and the prize is a question and the question is this: Which of us are people and which of us are meat?”

— Catherynne M. Valente

181. “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

182. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

186. “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

187. “My mistress used to say that you couldn’t ever really be naked unless you wanted to be. She said, ‘Even if you’ve taken off every stitch of clothing, you still have your secrets, your history, your true name. It’s quite difficult 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. And foxes and bears have skin, too, so I shan’t be ashamed if they’re not.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

189. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

191. “Everything looks like magic when you don’t understand it.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

192. “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

193. “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

194. “But no one may know the shape of the tale in which they move. And, perhaps, we do not truly know what sort of beast it is, either. Stories have a way of changing faces. They are unruly things, undisciplined, given to delinquency and the throwing of erasers. This is why we must close them up into thick, solid books, so they cannot get out and cause trouble.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

195. “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

196. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

198. “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

199. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente