Top 500 Catherynne M. Valente Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “A book is a door into another place and another heart and another world.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

405. “You and I, being grown-up and having lost our hearts at least twice or thrice along the way, might shut our eyes and cry out: Not that way, child! But as we have said, September was Somewhat Heartless, and felt herself reasonably safe on that road. Children always do.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

407. “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

408. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

410. “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

411. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

413. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

415. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

425. “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

426. “He didn’t even know how to talk about it. He had practiced not talking about the things he knew until no man could be called his equal.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

427. “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

428. “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

429. “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

430. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

432. “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

433. “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

434. “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

435. “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

436. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

438. “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

439. “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

440. “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

441. “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

442. “I am sustained by Being Necessary.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

443. “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

444. “Wife sounded like something exciting, something daring, something a bit scoundrelly, like pirate or bandit. And they were bandits, of course.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

445. “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

446. “It’s the most marvelous and terrible thing in the world. Everyone, but everyone, is pretending to be someone else.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

448. “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

449. “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

450. “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