Top 500 Catherynne M. Valente Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “September had no natural defense against lost things, being one herself.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

304. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

307. “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

308. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

314. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

320. “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

321. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

323. “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

324. “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

325. “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

326. “It appeals to the higher nature of the self to put aside food which once lived – I do not consider myself food, why should I ask all other creatures to consider themselves so?”

— Catherynne M. Valente

327. “Is it really a cage if it’s the size of the world?” “Yes,” said Emily, Charlotte, and Anne together, rather more loudly than any of them expected.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

328. “I hope, in years to come, I shall hold my heart up and it will be a pane of clear glass, through which I see all, but nothing is distorted.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

329. “Nothing real is pretty, she said. Only a doll is pretty. And a pretty doll drinks out of a tiny cup forever. A woman wants a big cup.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

330. “You’re grown – crooked and backbent, but grown – and it’s time to stop hanging your heart on your mother.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

331. “All the rest of the nonsense a story requires is just a long seduction of the ending. You throw out murders and reversals and heroes and detectives and spies, juggle love affairs and near escapes and standoffs with marvellous guns, kidnappings and sorcery and comic relief and gravediggers and princesses and albino dragons, and it’s all just to lure an ending into your bed.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

332. “Hounds and hearthstones, girl, haven’t you ever heard a story about Koschei? He’s only got the one. Act one, Scene one: pretty girl. Act one, Scene two: pretty girl gone!”

— Catherynne M. Valente

333. “A heart can learn ever so many tricks, and what sort of beast it becomes depends greatly upon whether it has been taught to sit up or to lie down, to speak or to beg, to roll over or to sound alarms, to guard or to attack, to find or to stay.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

334. “What happens to the West happens to Snow White, which is to say they both turn into jokes.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

335. “She sounds like someone who spends a lot of time in libraries, which are the best sorts of people.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

336. “You came!” he whispered. “How do you always find me?” The girl smiled. “Magic,” she whispered. “After all, I am a demon.” “You always come to the window, you come to find me and carry me away – that is not what girls are supposed to do. It is what the Princes do in all the stories.” “This is not that kind of story.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

337. “Nobody came without their sequins roaring.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

338. “Eternity takes forever.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

339. “But you like him already, I can tell. Even though we showed our teeth and were very clear about his being wicked.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

340. “September laughed and her laugh sounded like a roar; as if she had never been able to properly laugh in her whole life, only giggle or chuckle or grin, and now that she could do it right, now that her laughing had grown up and put bells on, it had become the most boisterous, rowdy roar you ever heard.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

341. “Doors opened at seven, the show started at eight. In pubs and clubs and house parties across the galaxy, the viewers at home were drunk by six.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

342. “If she was in a teaching mood she wasn’t in a hitting mood. Like sneezing and keeping your eyes open, Mrs. H couldn’t do both at once.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

343. “Tell it fast before you get scared and silence yourself. You’ll never wish you’d held back a little more.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

344. “Oh, September. My best girl. I shall tell you an awful, wonderful, unhappy, joyful secret: It is like that for everyone. One day you wake up and you are grown. And on the inside, you are no older than the last time you thought Wouldn’t it be lovely to be all Grown-Up right this second?”

— Catherynne M. Valente

345. “People who share a secret share a heart.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

346. “There is still a place in me, Masha, where my death once lay. I have a pain there, the way some men feel their legs long after they’ve been cut off at the knee. It is my pain, and I cannot share it. I would not, even if I could. I will age with you, if it will please you. I will match you, wrinkle for wrinkle, grey hair for grey hair, creak for creak, tumor for tumor. You will be so beautiful when you are old.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

347. “Well, very splendid and very frightening. But splendid things are often frightening. Sometimes, it’s the fright that makes them splendid at all.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

348. “She wasn’t angry. You can’t get angry just because the world’s so much bigger than you and you’re stuck in it.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

349. “My old friends, you must help me! Tell me what it is that a girl does in the way that a spider weaves, so that Solace will not grow up to be the wrong sort of girl.” We like the wrong sorts of girls, they wrote. They are usually the ones worth writing about.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

350. “You can never know how your clock runs. But it does run – and always faster than you think.”

— Catherynne M. Valente