Top 500 Catherynne M. Valente Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

305. “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

306. “I have to do it myself. That’s what a Queen does. She saves herself.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

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. “But no one may know the shape of the tale in which they move. And, perhaps, we do not truly know what sort of beast it is, either. Stories have a way of changing faces. They are unruly things, undisciplined, given to delinquency and the throwing of erasers. This is why we must close them up into thick, solid books, so they cannot get out and cause trouble.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

316. “Monsters almost always are culture’s way of working out their fears.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

317. “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

318. “No one belongs when they are new to this world. All children are Changelings.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

323. “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

324. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

326. “Nobody came without their sequins roaring.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

327. “Eternity takes forever.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— 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. “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

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. “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

338. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

340. “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

341. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

343. “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

344. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

347. “Some kinds of hurt almost feel good, you know? Familiar. Like an ugly couch in your parents’ house with the springs all bare where your daddy slapped you once for coming home late and now when you sleep on it it’s like one of those Indian fellas napping on nails but it makes you feel like you come from somewhere. Hurts like home.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

348. “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

349. “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

350. “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