Top 500 Catherynne M. Valente Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 6 of 10

251. “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

252. “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

253. “Who knows what wild things Sleeping Beauty dreamt of while waiting to awake?”

— Catherynne M. Valente

254. “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

255. “Don’t worry, my little lump of rock. Everybody gets a chance to choose. Or else where would irony come from?”

— Catherynne M. Valente

256. “No one’s good just from being born any place.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

257. “She’d thought she left feeling helpless behind long ago – only we never leave helpless behind. It is a country in which we all hold passports.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

258. “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

259. “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

260. “There is no such thing as a people who are all wicked or even all good. Everyone chooses. But even they, even they looked at people and saw only tools. No one is a cup for another to drink from.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

261. “That’s what a map is, you know. Just a memory.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

262. “The body does the living; the shadow does the dreaming.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

264. “The Sibyl Slant stared out of her slit eyes, the disc of her face showing no feeling at all. “Do you suppose you will look the same when you are an old woman as you do now? Most folk have three faces – the face they get when they’re children, the face they own when they’re grown, and the face they’ve earned when they’re old.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

265. “It is in the nature of winds to Snatch and Grasp at things, and Blow Them Away.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

266. “A girl in want of a Leopard still has feet.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

267. “Truly, Mallow yearned to know everything. Curiosity was part of her, like her short blond hair and bitten fingernails.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

268. “As far as quality housemates to be found on Planet Earth, it goes: dolphins, elephants, orangutans, octopi, then every single spider, then Joan of Arc, the Dalai Lama, Mr. Rogers, Freddie Mercury, my nan, all the scorpions, German measles, a dented recycling bin, and then maybe some of the rest of us.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

270. “This was how it was done; you bare your belly to a great beast and endure trials and it all works itself out. There is a treasure or a sword. Or a woman. And that thing is yours not because you defeated anything, or because your flesh was hard and unyielding, but because you were worthy of it, worthy all along.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

271. “The Party is a wonderful, marvelous invention, and it has taught us wonderful, marvelous things – chiefly, that we can cause more trouble with less effort by filing complaints than by breaking teacups.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

272. “A child equals the mass of Fairyland times the speed of luck squared.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

273. “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

274. “You come and go, vanish and appear. You miss years that go by for us, and we miss years that go by for you. We never know when we will find you again, or if we will. You meet us out of order, and sometimes I’ll be older and sometimes you will be because that’s the kind of story we’re in. It’s all jumbled up on the outside, but it all makes sense in your head. It all flows the right way in your heart.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

275. “A stepmother is like a bullet you can’t dig out. She fires true and she fires hot and she fires so quick that her metal hits your body before you even know there’s a fight on.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

276. “Over in the refrigerated section hang lies told so long ago and so often that they turned into the truth and get taught in history books.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

278. “But something older and wiser within her said, Some things are for hiding and for keeping.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

279. “We treat our stone wives with much more care than they treat their warm ones, anyway. I personally dust mine once a week, and I know Khaamil gives them presents when I am not looking. These are yours – they are in your care, and you must be faithful.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

280. “I have all the books I could need, and what more could I need than books?”

— Catherynne M. Valente

281. “Being on time is a filthy habit practised only by roosters and retirees.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

282. “September frowned; she probably did need to hear things which were cruel but true. If they were true it did not matter if they were cruel, even if all her mistakes were laid out before her like rings in a jeweler’s box.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

283. “For witches, there is but one King and one Palace – the one who has wronged them, and the house in which he lives. In fairness, Kings are often quite as dense, calling themselves sacred vessels and masters of all things above and below when in fact they command a few patches of lonely dirt with even lonelier houses sitting upon them.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

284. “And the heart of Ivan Nikolayevich broke inside the body of Marya Morevna, and the pieces of him lodged deep in her bones, and through the window, the stars watched.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

285. “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

286. “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

287. “Humanity lived many years and ruled the earth, sometimes wisely, sometimes well, but mostly neither.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

288. “Hats change everything. September knew this with all her being, deep in the place where she knew her own name, and that her mother would still love her even though she hadn’t waved goodbye. For one day her father had put on a hat with golden things on it and suddenly he hadn’t been her father anymore, he had been a soldier, and he had left. Hats have power. Hats can change you into someone else.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

289. “I belong in the refrigerator. Because the truth is, I’m just food for a superhero. He’ll eat up my death and get the energy he needs to become a legend.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

290. “She long ago learned that if she waited and blinked and behaved like a pupil, eventually someone would lecture her on something.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

291. “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

292. “When you can change something just by saying a word, that is magic.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

293. “Readers will always insist on adventures, and though you can have grief without adventures, you cannot have adventures without grief.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

294. “September had no natural defense against lost things, being one herself.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

295. “That is what happens when a person lives alone for so long – no one else can change their ways.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

296. “Some who deserve failure do not achieve it,” he sniffed. “Some who deserve nothing are given the world.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

297. “Bad things happen to bad people. Bad things happen to good people. Bad things happen to okay people. Bad things happen to everyone.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

298. “I won’t be one of the hundreds telling you that being alive flows like a story you write consciously, deliberately, full of linear narrative, foreshadowing, repetition, motifs. The emotional beats come down where they should, last as long as they should, end where they should, and that should come from somewhere real and natural, not from the tyranny of the theatre, the utter hegemony of fiction.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

299. “I have all the books I need, and what more could I need than books? I shall only engage in commerce if books are the coin.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

300. “Things that begin and end in grief: marriage, harvest, childbirth. Journeys away from home. Journeys toward home. Surgeries. Love. Weeping.”

— Catherynne M. Valente