Top 500 Catherynne M. Valente Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “But something older and wiser within her said, Some things are for hiding and for keeping.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

308. “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

309. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

312. “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

313. “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

314. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

318. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

320. “I shall not be afraid of anything I haven’t even seen yet. If Fairyland-Below is a terrible place, well, I shall feel sorry for it. But it might be a wonderful place! Just because the wild striped cats don’t know what diamonds are doesn’t mean they’re vicious; it just means they have wildcat sorts of wants and wealth and ways of thinking, and perhaps I could learn them and be a little wilder and cattier and stripier myself.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

321. “It was late spring when Marya Morevna slid her brass key into the lock of the house on Dzerzhinskaya Street, feeling it slide, too, between her own ribs, and open her like a reliquary full of old, nameless bones.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

322. “Love rarely waits for permission.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

323. “One is always homesick for places where one came to grief.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

324. “I’m an extra in your story. Well, you’re an extra in mine, boy.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

325. “Dying happens to everyone, even stars. Even the stuff between the stars. But if you believe in yourself and achieve your goals, you can die so hard that no one will ever forget you, and that’s almost as good as not dying at all. Well, it isn’t, really, it isn’t at all, and believing and achieving is just something sportscasters say, but what are you gonna do, not die? Try it. I’ll wait.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

326. “A choice is like a jigsaw puzzle, darling troll. Your worries are the corner pieces, and your hopes are the edge pieces, and you, Hawthorn, dearest of boys, are the middle pieces, all funny-shaped and stubborn. But the picture, the picture was there all along, just waiting for you to get on with it.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

327. “Magic is just a word for what’s left to the powerless once everyone else has eaten their fill.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

328. “She always gave the impression of having accidentally wandered in from a mad scientist’s conference, and felt rather desperate to get back.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

329. “This is a very marvelous thing. A winter thing, when everything is pickled and preserved under glass. You can taste summer in this mixture, summer boiled down and soaked in brine, mummified, packed with spices to be born again on this table, in this place, in this snow.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

330. “Hey there,” the steely abomination said with infinite, Buddha-like compassion, “it looks like you’re trying to come to grips with the existence of events and entities far beyond your experience and, as a result, are currently undergoing a small, entirely understandable, psychological break. Would you like help?”

— Catherynne M. Valente

331. “You get the face you build your whole life, with work and loving and grieving and laughing and frowning.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

332. “If you have ever seen a falling star, you have seen a Changeling arriving.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

333. “The calligrapher coughed, for his room was very dusty, and there was dust even on his eyelashes, and said: “It is right and proper,” he said, “for a girl to read as many books as there are bricks in this city, and then, when she is finished, to begin to write new ones which are made out of the old ones, as this city is made of those stones.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

334. “I’ve always found chess to be a bit too much like real life to provide much enjoyment as a game.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

335. “Everybody’s strange everywhere. Most of the trick of being a social animal is pretending you’re not. But who do you fool? Nobody worth talking to.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

336. “Funniest thing about love, how it shakes loose when no one’s looking. How the dark helps it along. Maybe that’s why we dug caves so much, way back when.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

337. “And the funny, impish magic of a wrap party is that everyone still has scraps of their characters hanging off them like Salome’s veils, fluttering, fading, but not quite finished tangling the tongue and tripping the feet. You’re not in Wonderland anymore, but you positively reek of rabbit.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

338. “Obviously, the eating or drinking of Fairy foodstuffs constitutes a binding contract to return at least once a year in accordance with seasonal myth cycles.” September started. “What? What does that mean?” The Green Wind stroked his neatly pointed beard. “It means: Eat anything you like, precious cherry child!”

— Catherynne M. Valente

339. “Just remember that the only question in a house is who is to rule. The rest is only dancing around that, trying not to look it in the eye.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

Featured in: Romance Quotes

340. “When little ones say they want to go home, they almost never mean it. They mean they are tired of this particular game and would like to start another.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

341. “People are mostly happiest when they think they’re just about to get the thing they want most. Before and after, they’re all monsters.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

342. “I heard there’s fire in hell, but I’ll bet the devil just hands you a bucket and tells you to get moving, this place ain’t gonna clean itself.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

343. “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

344. “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

345. “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

346. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

348. “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

349. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente