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. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “Perhaps one was not meant to see what a husband looked like before he made himself more or less presentable. Perhaps the republic of husbands was a strange and frightening place full of not only birds, but bats too, and lizards, and bears, and worms, and other beasts waiting to fall out of a tree and into a wedding ring.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

206. “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

207. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

218. “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

219. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

222. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

224. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

235. “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

236. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

239. “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

240. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

242. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

249. “Temperament, you’ll find, is highly dependent on time of day, weather, frequency of naps, and whether one has had enough to eat.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente