Top 500 Catherynne M. Valente Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “What mirrors we are, set to face each other, reflecting desire.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

203. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

205. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

207. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

209. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

220. “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

221. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

223. “Everyone Is Looking for a Book Strong Enough to Change Them.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

224. “Be my friend and love me, for the world is terrible lonely and I am sad.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

225. “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

226. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

229. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

232. “A tale may have exactly three beginnings: one for the audience, one for the artist, and one for the poor bastard who has to live in it.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

233. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

235. “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

236. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

238. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

240. “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

241. “Be nice to Fairyland. She is old and tender of heart and when her feelings are hurt, she cries volcanoes.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

243. “Every person draws a map that shows themselves at the center. But that does not mean that no other countries exist.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

246. “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

247. “Honesty is such a nasty habit, dear. Like biting your nails.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

250. “I still want to kiss you. To feel the life in you seize on the life in me. Raw and fresh and new.”

— Catherynne M. Valente