Top 500 Catherynne M. Valente Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “If you have ever seen a falling star, you have seen a Changeling arriving.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

352. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

367. “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

368. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

370. “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

371. “Nobody came without their sequins roaring.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

372. “Eternity takes forever.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

373. “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

374. “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

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.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

387. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

389. “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

390. “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

391. “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

392. “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

393. “The great blessing and great cruelty of youth is that there seems to be time enough.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

394. “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

395. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

397. “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

398. “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

399. “Still life is boring. Never stand still! Jumping bean life!”

— Catherynne M. Valente

400. “A girl who never smiles has such power – what men will do to turn up but one corner of her mouth! She already wears her red war-gown and her circlet of cinnabar poppies. They bring out the color in her grimace.”

— Catherynne M. Valente