Top 500 Catherynne M. Valente Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Being Necessary is food no less than cabbages and strawberry pies.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

352. “All the rest of the nonsense a story requires is just a long seduction of the ending.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

353. “I don’t know why you would even bring up the internet. The xeno-intelligence officer responsible for evaluating your digital communication required invasive emergency therapy after an hour’s exposure. One glance at that thing is the strongest argument possible against the sentience of humanity. I wouldn’t draw attention to it, if I were you.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

360. “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

361. “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

362. “Love rarely waits for permission.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

365. “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

366. “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

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. “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

370. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

373. “I do not want to muddle about with Politicks, and whenever two Folk of any sort are in a room together there are always Politicks to be muddled in.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

374. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

384. “We make our worlds of stranger stuff: We choose people who do not annoy us, places of green or glass and steel that feel as alive and necessary as our brothers and sisters, houses in which everything has a place, rules such as Do Not Take Things That Aren’t Yours Unless No One Is Looking and Good Things Happen to Good People and A Year Is 365 Days are agreed upon, even when they aren’t true, perhaps especially so.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

385. “Americans all acted like they were trying to pretend they hadn’t just chased a fistful of ecstasy with a noseful of coke to save themselves from a police officer only they could see.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

386. “Storytelling can save you. Both the telling and the listening.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

388. “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

389. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

391. “She felt as she often did in class when she was nearly sure she had the right answer, but could not always make herself raise her hand.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

393. “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

394. “One doesn’t behave at all the same way to a grandfather as to a bosom friend, to a professor as to a curious niece.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

395. “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

396. “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

397. “In his own country, Death can be kind.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

398. “Did everything that had magic have teeth?”

— Catherynne M. Valente

399. “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

400. “Zelda was winter’s best dame: pale and dark with a shimmer of Christmas in her eye, a flash of New Year’s in her laugh.”

— Catherynne M. Valente