Top 500 Catherynne M. Valente Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

405. “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

406. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

408. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

412. “Whenever one does extraordinary things, someone is bound to try to repeat them for themselves. It’s the way of the world.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

414. “September had no natural defense against lost things, being one herself. She could not quite have put it into words, but she felt profoundly, at the bottom of her new, shining heart, that she could find lost things. She could make them un-lost if she were brave enough. After all, if enough lost things band together, even in the darkest depths, they aren’t really lost at all anymore.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

415. “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

416. “Oh, aren’t you just the rottenest wet blanket whoever spoiled a sport.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

417. “Twelve mothers and twelve fathers were stacked into the long, thin house, each with four children, drawing the old cobalt-and-silver curtains down the center of rooms to make labyrinths of twelve dining rooms, twelve stting rooms, twelve bedrooms. It could be said, and was, that Marya Morevna had twelve mothers and twelve fathers, and so did all the children of that long, thin house.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

418. “A body can only deliver up the truth its bones know, Its blood, which is its history.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

419. “That’s how it goes – as soon as there’s anything interesting in Ancient Greece, some arsehole with a magic hat comes along to murder it.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

420. “Mabry Muscat looked pleadingly at Mallow, and she could not understand why they all obeyed him – except that of course the King could eat them, and of course he was King, and did not people everywhere do more or less as they were told when someone with a crown did the telling?”

— Catherynne M. Valente

421. “It’s a secret and if you tell a secret the secret comes alive and can never be kept safe at home again.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

422. “Eternity takes forever. The infinite expanse of time just does not know when to quit.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

423. “So it is written – but so, too, it is crossed out. You can write over it again. You can make notes in the margins. You can cut out the whole page. You can, and you must, edit and rewrite and reshape and pull out the wrong parts like bones and find just the thing and you can forever, forever, write more and more and more, thicker and longer and clearer. Living is a paragraph, constantly rewritten.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

424. “Sometimes I am a cicada, hissing and singing in the leaves of a tree by the sunlit water, thoughtless and wordless, a voice that is all consonants and tribal clicks. Sometimes I rub my legs together like a string bass, and the lake quivers.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

425. “I am sustained by Being Necessary.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

426. “Do you think, if Columbus had stood on the bow of his ship, looked at the New World and understood everything to come, all the disease and death and betrayal, all the ugliness, all the blood – do you think he would have embraced it, called it paradise?”

— Catherynne M. Valente

427. “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

428. “Children make prayers so thoughtlessly, building them up like sand castles – and they are always surprised when suddenly the castle becomes real, and the iron gate grinds shut.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

429. “This is what comes of having a heart, even a very small and young one. It causes no end of trouble, and that’s the truth.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

430. “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

431. “That’s how kings are made, my brush-tailed girl – they pick a place, shove a stick in it, call themselves King and wait to see if someone gets angry about it. No one has gotten angry so far, so that makes the otters mine.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

432. “And my cases end like all stories end: with a sunset, and a kiss, and redemption, and iron shoes, and a sear of light from the shadows, a gun-muzzle flash that illuminates everything as the rain just keeps coming down in the motley, several-colored light of the back end of the world.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

433. “All our precontact simulations categorized you as a Down-to-Clown Unflappable Guy Who Can Handle This Sort of Thing No Problem with a high probability of Being Actually into It All the Way.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

434. “Any story told is a lie cunningly told to hide the real world from the poor bastards who live in it.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

435. “It is best in the end to let women see to their own vengeance.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

436. “Strictly speaking,′ said the King of Fairies between mouthfuls, ‘I’m leasing you this food on a limited, bite-by-bite basis and a generous payment-deferral plan. I’d have thought someone would have told you about Fairy food. You always pay, lad. I’m not running a charity delicatessen.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

437. “She sounds like someone who spends a lot of time in libraries, which are the best sorts of people.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

438. “At the snowy summit of all these things, however, is the fact that you simply cannot go about locking your siblings in towers when they misbehave. It is unseemly and betrays a sad lack of creativity.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

439. “What’s the difference between being dead and having a boyfriend? Death sticks around.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

440. “I believe we have an utterly unique specimen on our hands: a child who listens.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

441. “The tales lovers tell each other about how they met are hushed and secret things. They change year by year, for we all meet many times as we grow up and become different and new and exciting people – and this never stops, even for a minute, even when we are ninety.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

442. “For when a box is shut, you cannot tell what it might contain, so you might as well say it contains everything, because, really, it could contain anything, see? But when you open it, you affect what is inside. Observing something changes it, that’s a law, nothing to be done.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

443. “Do you know what a thirteen-year-old girl can do when she is alone and frightened and believes she is right?”

— Catherynne M. Valente

444. “Of course she cheated. Don’t be silly. Snow White spent half her growing years shuffling cards for no one. She can cut false and she can cut true, but she wasn’t going to lose when it counted.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

445. “But I am a sly and wicked narrator. If there is a secret to be plumbed for your benefit, Dear Reader, I shall strap on a head-lamp and a pick-ax and have at it.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

446. “Everything in this place was livid and lurid and living, and when he loved her and hurt her all at once she lived, too, higher and harder than she had thought she could.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

447. “Folk are just folk, wherever you go, and it’s only a nasty sort of person who thinks a body’s a devil just because they come from another country and have different notions.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

448. “But even the wisest of men may die, and that is especially true when the wisest of men has a fondness for industrial chemicals.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

449. “What was magical at two in the morning was tawdry and cheap and dangerous to your health at two in the afternoon.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

450. “The only price in the world that matters is the one that hurts to pay.”

— Catherynne M. Valente