Top 500 Catherynne M. Valente Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 6 of 10

251. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

253. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

255. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

257. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— 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. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

264. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

278. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

283. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

285. “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

286. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

288. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

290. “All Librarians are members of the Catalogue. That’s what you call a coven when it’s made up of Librarians instead of witches. Librarians have sorted and alphabetized all the magic that ever thought to put a rabbit and a hat together. Who do you think invented Special Collections?”

— Catherynne M. Valente

291. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

294. “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

295. “You are my treasure, my pale gold, the heart of my heart. You lie at the bottom of my being and gnaw upon my roots.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

296. “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

297. “Night poured itself down my throat. Night was my wine and my meat. Night wed me and bedded me, widowed me and murdered me and resurrected me whole a thousand times over with each hour.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

298. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente