Top 500 Catherynne M. Valente Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “I want to be myself again. I want to be six. I want to stop knowing everything I know.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

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. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

360. “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

361. “Love rarely waits for permission.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

367. “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

368. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

370. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

374. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

376. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— 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. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

387. “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

388. “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

389. “Very well, you do so love rules! I shall make some up for you on the spot, so that my little moppet is not forced to wander the world in a soup of stories without laws. A tale may have exactly three beginnings: one for the audience, one for the artist, and one for the poor bastard who has to live in it.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

390. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

394. “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

395. “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

396. “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

397. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

399. “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

400. “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