Top 500 Catherynne M. Valente Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “There is no better teacher of rough necessity than bad luck, and you will have great use of me, I promise.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

352. “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

353. “Nobody came without their sequins roaring.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

354. “Eternity takes forever.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

361. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

367. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

369. “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

370. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

382. “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

383. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

385. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

387. “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

388. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

390. “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

391. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

395. “A body is never so vicious as when it has only itself to blame for its trouble.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

396. “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

397. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

399. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente