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

402. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

404. “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

405. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

408. “There is no better teacher of rough necessity than bad luck, and you will have great use of me, I promise.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

409. “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

410. “Love rarely waits for permission.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

411. “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

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

415. “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

416. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

419. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

421. “But the story is no good without a villain. It can’t feel true without a villain. Otherwise, everything would already be as it ought to be, yes? Someone has to be at fault. And if you are the hero, it stands to reason that folk who do not look like you or talk like you or like to eat the same things you like to eat must be the villains. After all, the world is easy and simple, is it not?”

— Catherynne M. Valente

422. “She got, instead, a towering confection that might have thought about becoming a sandwich at one point, but had gotten greater ambitions along the way.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

423. “The Sirens flicked their wings at the wall, inscribing it with their own blue ink: Even in penance is beauty; blessed are all the ocean’s drowned!”

— Catherynne M. Valente

424. “I’m quite civilized, I promise,’ Manythanks sniffed, smiling. ‘Wairwulves are cultured. We have choirs and charity races and rotary clubs. It’s when we’re human that you must take care.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

426. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

428. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

430. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

432. “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

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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

440. “I am sustained by Being Necessary.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

441. “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

442. “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

443. “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

444. “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

445. “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

446. “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

447. “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

448. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente