Top 500 Catherynne M. Valente Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

166. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

168. “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

169. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

173. “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

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

— 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. “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

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

181. “I have to know, I have to or else you will just rule me until the end of everything because you know and I do not.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

190. “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

191. “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

192. “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

193. “Falling in love is embarrassing. It is not hardcore. It is not part of the scene.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

195. “I want to be myself again. I want to be six. I want to stop knowing everything I know.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

197. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

200. “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