Top 500 Catherynne M. Valente Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “He tried to reconstruct the story in his mind, but it kept getting confused, bleeding into itself like watercolors.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

402. “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

403. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

405. “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

406. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

411. “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

412. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

414. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

416. “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

417. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

419. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

421. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

423. “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

424. “September smiled at her wonderful friends in all their colors and bright eyes and gentle ways. “You know, in Fairyland-Above they said that the underworld was full of devils and dragons. But it isn’t so at all! 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

425. “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

426. “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

427. “She had a highly developed sense of humor which in some lights looked a bit like a sense of justice.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

428. “The tyrannosaurus looked a little shamefaced – but only a little, for dinosaurs would rather drown in tar than admit they’re wrong. That unfortunate attitude played a key role in their extinction.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

429. “The Land of Parents is strange and full of peril.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

430. “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

431. “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

432. “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

433. “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

434. “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

435. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

437. “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

438. “I don’t see where you get off fretting about whether or not the end of the world is family-friendly.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

439. “How much better if life were more like books, if life lied a little more, and gave up its stubborn and boring adherence to the way things can be, and thought a little more imaginatively about the way things might be.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

440. “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

441. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

443. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

446. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

448. “Kick-starting the gas-guzzling subcompact go-cart of organic sentience is as easy as shoving it down a hill and watching the whole thing spontaneously explode.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

449. “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

450. “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