Top 500 Catherynne M. Valente Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

305. “I asked a queen once why she didn’t want me. She wasn’t a powerful queen, not a monarch of Spain or of Albania. Just a little kingdom of nowhere, but she married well and she had a crown. The queen of nowhere looked at me with her clear grey eyes and said: “Because I don’t want to be in a story.” Princesses usually grow up to be queens. The cleverness sticks long after the beauty goes.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

323. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

325. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

327. “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

328. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

331. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

338. “That’s the only way to look at things, I always say,” propounded the Duke. “Slantways, sideways, and upside down.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

339. “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

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. “Love rarely waits for permission.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

344. “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

345. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

347. “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

348. “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

349. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente