Top 500 Catherynne M. Valente Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

211. “Death stands behind every bride, every groom.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

212. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

214. “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

215. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

219. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

228. “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

229. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

231. “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

232. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

234. “A tongue is very like a gun, which is why they nearly rhyme. Both can be fired to devastating effect, for good or evil, and both can explode in your hands, wounding your comrades instead of your enemies.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

236. “Things that are unsightly: birthmarks, infidelity, strangers in one’s kitchen. Too much sunlight. Stitches. Missing teeth. Overlong guests.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

237. “In my experience, folk find it nigh on impossible to call a thing what it is. It.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

238. “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

239. “It’s Latin, which is an excellent language for mischief-making, which is why governments are so fond of it.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

240. “We always dreamed the same dreams, which was like living twice.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

241. “But love is love, and love is compulsion. I must, and I do.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

243. “There are no tigers for us, just a city, waiting, and it loves us, in whatever ways a city can love.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

244. “You have to be able to see the world as a whole to bear it – to see the Queerness that moves in every bit of Fairyland, how it threads through every heart and field, how we are all bound together up in the Weird Well of the World.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

245. “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

246. “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

247. “I’ve a devil of a habit for being right.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

248. “She’s got a man’s nightshirt on and stockings with holes in them. Somebody else’s tie, a gold and green chevroned number, hangs around her neck and just at this moment it looks like a king’s mantle draped over her shoulders. Her hair’s all loose, her lipstick and eyeliner gone a-roving. She’s got a cigar in one hand and a jar full of gin in the other, and she’s laughing, laughing like for once that damned chicken crossed the road for something really good.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

249. “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

250. “That’s what a map is, you know. Just a memory. Just a wish to go back home – someday, somehow.”

— Catherynne M. Valente