Top 500 Catherynne M. Valente Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Monsters almost always are culture’s way of working out their fears.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

352. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “She often felt that she chased the ideal cup of coffee in her mind from table to table, the rich, thick, creamy coffee, spicy, bittersweet, that betrayed no hint of thinness or chemical flavoring, nothing less than total, fathomless devotion to the state of being itself. Every morning she pulled a delicate cup from its brass hook and filled it, hoping that it would be dark and deep and secret as a forest, and each morning it cooled too fast, had too much milk, stained the cup, made her nervous.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

364. “When you don’t need anything anymore, the only thing you need is stories, and songs, and beauty, and spectacle. That’s the good stuff. The stuff that reminds us who we are.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

365. “But when it finally did happen, the alien invasion turned out to be much more like Mr. Looney of the Tunes than Mr. Ridley of the Scott. Point to Nani.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

366. “You can’t kiss a girl into anything.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

368. “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

369. “It’s a dreadful world with only your own heart to drive you.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

370. “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

371. “You and I, being grown-up and having lost our hearts at least twice or thrice along the way, might shut our eyes and cry out: Not that way, child! But as we have said, September was Somewhat Heartless, and felt herself reasonably safe on that road. Children always do.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

372. “War must always be done out of sight, it shocks people and they stop immediately.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

373. “Maidens stand still, they are lovely statues and all admire them. Witches do not stand still. I was neither, but better that I err on the side of witchery, witchery that unlocks towers and empties ships.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

374. “Trouble is, most times, when you go looking to sell your soul, nobody’s buying.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

375. “I’ll put this in words you can understand: humans are hideous, pain-guzzling, pollution-spouting space monsters who might threaten our way of life. Now, how does that usually pan out in the movies, kitten? At least we let you try to convince us we’re wrong. I doubt you asked the dodo birds what they thought about it before you blasted the last one in the face with a blunderbuss.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

376. “It tasted like a shade of white near blue; it tasted like the idea of pearls; it tasted like a memory nearly grasped but lost at the last moment.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

377. “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

378. “She didn’t like to say things flatly, but sometimes it is the perfect antidote to someone trying to convince you the noose in their hand is a lovely silk ribbon for your hair.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

379. “A book is a door into another place and another heart and another world.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

380. “One of her dearest and handsomest friends was a sorcerer, and from him she had learned so much magic even her hairpins got up and started living serious-minded lives, writing hairpin-ballads, celebrating hairpin-holidays, and inventing several new schools of philosophy.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

381. “All jobs are odd, or they would be games or naps or picnics.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

382. “He tried to reconstruct the story in his mind, but it kept getting confused, bleeding into itself like watercolors.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

383. “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

384. “Didn’t you know? All stepmothers are witches. It is our compensation for remaining forever an intruder in another woman’s house.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

385. “Some switches must be flipped, and some children cannot help turning off to on and on to off, just to see what will happen.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

386. “Fairyland is a very Scientifick place. We subscribe to all the best journals.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

387. “I want to keep on living forever and watching heroes and fools and knights go up and down, into the world and out. I want to keep being myself and mind the work that minds me. Work is not always a hard thing that looms over your years. Sometimes, work is the gift of the world to the wanting.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

388. “Did you never wonder why the old books are so full of dragons chasing after maidens? The serpents think the girls are orphans, and long to get them away in a lair so that they may grow up strong and tall.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

389. “When the world changes, it stashes us away where we can’t make it run the other way again.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

390. “The ghosts will eat everything because the bellies of ghosts want the whole world, just to fill one tiny corner.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

392. “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

393. “They start setting up on a little left stage playing my secret favorite song: the rustling of sheet music and set lists, the coughing and quiet warm-up, the tuning of instruments, squeak of speakers and amps, the last rags on cigarettes and popping of knuckles.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

394. “Love rarely waits for permission.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

395. “It was at thirteen years old that Marya Morevna learned how to keep a secret, and that secrets are jealous things, permitting no fraternization.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

396. “Being a troll, he loved the earth. A troll’s love for the earth is a peculiar thing – it is something like the way you and I love our parents and our dogs and our favorite novels and the stuffed rabbits we have had since we were in our cradles and the very best thing we have ever done with our own two hands, all smashed up together in a rough, enormous ball of feeling the size of a planet.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

397. “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

398. “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

399. “Of all the Fairy strangeness she had known, this seemed suddenly both the strangest and least strange of all. How she would have liked to be looked after like that, cared for and watched over. And yet at the same time, she understood the Whelk, and wished she could grow big enough to hold on to everyone she loved at once. To keep them safe and with her always and know their secret needs well enough to answer them.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

400. “I’ll put this in words you can understand: humans are hideous, pain-guzzling, pollution-spouting space monsters who might threaten our way of life.”

— Catherynne M. Valente