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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

253. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

255. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

258. “First Law of Heroics.” The Monaciello grinned up at a confused September. “Someone has to tell you it’s impossible, or the Quest can’t go on.”

— 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. “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

265. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— 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. “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

272. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

276. “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

277. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

281. “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

282. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

285. “There is no better teacher of rough necessity than bad luck, and you will have great use of me, I promise.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

286. “This is some hard-core, triple-X, keep-it-in-the-back-room-under-a-curtain, Alice in Wonderland action is what this is,” Decibel said with total delight.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

287. “I did not see the appeal of a wife. We had never had one before. She would not be half as interesting as our buffalo.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

291. “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

292. “It is such hard work to keep your heart hidden! And worse, by the time you find it easy, it will be harder still to show it.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

293. “There’s more than one way between your world and ours. There’s the changeling road, and there’s the Ravishing, and there’s those that Stumble through a gap in the hedgerows or a mushroom ring or a tornado or a wardrobe full of winter coats.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

294. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

297. “We who were once living can guard you still, and love you, and keep you living safe and whole. Nothing ever truly dies.”

— 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. “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

300. “Some small ones learn to stitch together a Coat of Scowls or a Scarf of Jokes to hide their Hearts. Some hammer up a Fort of Books to protect theirs.”

— Catherynne M. Valente