Top 500 Catherynne M. Valente Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “Each arrow was fletched in feathers that once belonged to immortal birds so wise that if you asked them to tell you the meaning of life, they would have an answer, and it would be short, and easy to understand, and as true as tea.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

212. “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

213. “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

214. “Kid, nobody really gets anywhere in this life. Everybody just picks someplace to hunker down and barricade themselves in. Some of us just got better bricks than others.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

215. “The thing I hate about being dead is you can’t move on. I was in love with him when I died, so I’ll be in love with him till the sun burns out.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

216. “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

217. “And honey, everybody eats art and drinks stories. It’s the best drunk there is!”

— Catherynne M. Valente

218. “I’m not afraid of you!′ The wombat yelled. ‘I saw you get stuck in the washing machine once. Round and round you went! Who’s afraid of something that can’t defeat a rinse cycle?”

— Catherynne M. Valente

219. “And in her long nights, in her long house of smoke and miller’s stones, she baked the bread we eat in dreams, strangest loaves, her pies full of anguish and days long dead, her fairy-haunted gingerbread, her cakes wet with tears.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

220. “You know how we can be about things which sparkle and shine. We imagine they will put back something of what has been lost.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

221. “September drank in the starry sky with a longing and a tugging and a sigh. All the way up, to that enormous crescent in the black.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

222. “Oh, quit that. Blushing is for virgins and Christians.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

223. “If he lost everything else, pride, priapism, and producer credit, Decibel Jones would never, never give up his swagger.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

224. “Temptation likes best those who think they have a natural immunity, for it may laugh all the harder when they succumb.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

225. “Tamburlaine’s house seemed more a place where books kept their people than where people kept their books.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

227. “She had not known before that she wanted all these things, that she preferred dark hair and a slightly cruel expression, that she wished for tallness, or that a man kneeling might thrill her.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

228. “I have to do it myself. That’s what a Queen does. She saves herself.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

230. “Blue is for cruel bargains; green is for daring what you oughtn’t; violet is for brute force. I will say to you: Coral coaxes; pink insists; red compels. I will say to you: You are dear to me as attar of roses. Please do not get eaten.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

231. “The trouble was, September didn’t know what sort of story she was in. Was it a merry one or a serious one? How ought she to act? If it was merry, she might dash after a Spoon and it would all be a grand adventure, with funny rhymes and somersaults and a grand party at the end with red lanterns. But if it was a serious tale, she might have to do something important, something involving with snow and arrows and enemies.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

232. “Most people don’t like complexity. They would prefer the world to be simple.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

233. “I shall be as brave as a my Toad, he thought, for my Toad never hides under the bed when she is afraid of lightning or bats. She sticks out her tongue and eats them.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

234. “Flowers are always more serious than they appear.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

235. “Secrets are delicate things. They can fill you up with sweetness and leave you like a cat who has found a particularly fat sparrow to eat and did not get clawed or bitten even once while she was about it. But they can also get stuck inside you, and very slowly boil up your bones for their bitter soup. Then the secret has you, not the other way around.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

236. “Life’s still stupid but we got free of story out here under the beeches and the Big Dipper. We had enough of it, of things happening one after another and no end in sight. Of reversals and falling in love and tragic flaws, and by God if I see another motif in my business I will shoot it dead.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

237. “Some girls have to go to college to discover what they are good at; some are born doing what they must without even truly knowing why. I felt a hole in my heart shaped like a dark door I needed to guard.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

238. “What mirrors we are, set to face each other, reflecting desire.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

239. “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

240. “I do not want to be human. I want to be myself. They think I am a lion, that I will chase them. I will not deny I have lions in me. I am the monster in the wood. I have wonders in my house of sugar. I have parts of myself I do not yet understand. I am not a Good Robot. To tell a story about a robot who wants to be human is a distraction. There is no difference. Alive is alive. There is only one verb that matters: to be.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

241. “A ring don’t make a bride, that’s all.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

242. “Close up your head; your brain is getting loose.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

243. “It calmed him to collect the things he knew and did not speak of.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

244. “Dredge up a hostile, sulfurous silicate lava sink slaloming between two phlegmy suns well into their shuffleboard years, a miserable wad of hell-spit, free-range acid clouds, and the gravitational equivalent of untreated diabetes, a stellar expletive that should never be forced to cope with something as toxic and flammable as a civilization, and before you can say no, stop, don’t, why? the place will be crawling with postcapitalist glass balloons filled with sentient gases all called Ursula.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

245. “A mother’s like a poison made for only one soul.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

246. “I wonder sometimes what the memory of God looks like. Is it a palace of infinite rooms, a chest of many jeweled objects, a long, lonely landscape where each tree recalls an eon, each pebble the life of a man? Where do I live, in the memory of God?”

— Catherynne M. Valente

247. “I will not let her speak because I love her, and when you love someone you do not make them tell war stories.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

248. “I asked a queen once why she didn’t want me. She wasn’t a powerful queen, not a monarch of Spain or of Albania. Just a little kingdom of nowhere, but she married well and she had a crown. The queen of nowhere looked at me with her clear grey eyes and said: “Because I don’t want to be in a story.” Princesses usually grow up to be queens. The cleverness sticks long after the beauty goes.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

249. “The storm ate up September’s cry of despair, delighted at its mischief, as all storms are.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

250. “A Fairy must make her own way in the world, for the world will never make way for her. That, incidentally, is the First Theorem of Questing Physicks, which.”

— Catherynne M. Valente