Top 500 Catherynne M. Valente Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “The ghosts will eat everything because the bellies of ghosts want the whole world, just to fill one tiny corner.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

403. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

405. “It is unutterably boring, the multitudes in progression from innocence to inkling to knowledge to the inevitable apotheosis of desperation.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

412. “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

413. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

415. “There’s more than one way between your world and ours. There’s the changeling road, and there’s the Ravishing, and there’s those that Stumble through a gap in the hedgerows or a mushroom ring or a tornado or a wardrobe full of winter coats.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

416. “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

417. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

420. “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

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

425. “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

426. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

428. “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

429. “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

430. “She always gave the impression of having accidentally wandered in from a mad scientist’s conference, and felt rather desperate to get back.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

431. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

433. “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

434. “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

435. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

438. “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

439. “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

440. “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

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

— Catherynne M. Valente

442. “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

443. “I am sustained by Being Necessary.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

444. “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

445. “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

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. “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

448. “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

449. “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

450. “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