Top 500 Catherynne M. Valente Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

404. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

428. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

430. “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

431. “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

432. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

434. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

437. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

439. “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

440. “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

441. “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

442. “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

443. “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

444. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

447. “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

448. “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

449. “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

450. “Autumn is the very soul of metamorphosis, a time when the world is poised at the door of winter – which is the door of death – but has not yet fallen. It is a world of contradictions: a time of harvest and plenty but also of cold and hardship. Here we dwell in the midst of life, but we know most keenly that all things must pass away and shrivel. Autumn turns the world from one thing into another. The year is seasoned and wise but not yet decrepit or senile.”

— Catherynne M. Valente