Top 500 Catherynne M. Valente Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “It is in the nature of winds to Snatch and Grasp at things, and Blow Them Away.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

307. “Nobody came without their sequins roaring.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

308. “Eternity takes forever.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

320. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

323. “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

324. “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

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

— 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. “And, at night, in a narrow bed in her old room, Mary Morevna would hold Ivan tight inside of her, demanding his obedience to her, demanding that his soul be ripped out and emptied into her.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

329. “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

330. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

332. “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

333. “Being Necessary is food no less than cabbages and strawberry pies.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

334. “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

335. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

337. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

339. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

342. “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

343. “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

344. “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

345. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

347. “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

348. “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

349. “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

350. “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