Top 500 Catherynne M. Valente Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

253. “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

254. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

258. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

260. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

262. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

264. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

266. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

269. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

272. “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

273. “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

274. “Shoes are funny beasts. You think they’re just clothes, but really, they’re alive. They want things. Fancy ones with gems want to go to balls, big boots want to go to work, slippers want to dance. Or sleep. Shoes make the path you’re on. Change your shoes, change your path.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

278. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

281. “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

282. “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

283. “Humans do not proceed in an orderly fashion from one scene to the next. Memory lies underneath happenstance; hope and dread sprawl on top. Our days and nights are their endless orgies.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

289. “It was on the to-do list, but you know to-do lists. They get longer and longer until you might as well just carve the last items on your tombstone. Do the dishes.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

291. “Breakfast brought an oppressive gloom down upon my spirit. Soft-boiled eggs oozed a golden ichor of loneliness onto my spoon; the buttered rolls spoke only of the further torment of my being. Failure swirled in the milky depths of my tea and the bacon I devoured was the bacon of grief.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

292. “Very well, you do so love rules! I shall make some up for you on the spot, so that my little moppet is not forced to wander the world in a soup of stories without laws. 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

293. “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

294. “After so long keeping to herself and tending her secret quietly, all these words just bubbled up out of her her like cool golden champagne.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

295. “It is unutterably boring, the multitudes in progression from innocence to inkling to knowledge to the inevitable apotheosis of desperation.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

296. “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

297. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

299. “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

300. “You should always listen to minotaurs. Anybody with four stomachs has to have a firm grip on reality.”

— Catherynne M. Valente