Top 100 Catherynne Valente Quotes
#1. The grass and the rivers and the stones and women and horses and more Stars and men and clouds and birds and trees came dancing through the afterbirth of the Mare,
Catherynne M Valente
#2. You have to have the right sort of stone. Peridot for mothers, girasol for lovers, sapphire for sadness, and garnet for joy.
Catherynne M Valente
#3. Being stern was like being underwater-she could do it, but never for long, and how her whole boy burned to come up for breath!
Catherynne M Valente
#4. 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
#5. There a difference between having been coded to present a vast set of standardized responses to certain human facial, vocal, and linguistic states and having evolved to exhibit response B to input A in order to bring about a desired social result?
Catherynne M Valente
#7. I've no idea what I shall do when I am grown! I don't suppose there is much call for Knights or Bishops or Heroines in Omaha or even Chicago. And I'm sure other girls are much better at it than I.
Catherynne M Valente
#8. 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
#10. But it is difficult for men to disbelieve a woman who insists that she wishes to serve them, and he nodded assent.
Catherynne M Valente
#11. Why should I care about you first kiss,' he said. 'You can kiss anyone you like. But sometimes if you wanted to kiss me, that would be all right, too.
Catherynne M Valente
#12. But as has been said, September read often, and liked it best when words did not pretend to be simple, but put on their full armor and rode out with colors flying.
Catherynne M Valente
#13. And hell, sometimes the best thing is to put on a black dress and become a wicked stepmother. There's power in that, if you're after power.
Catherynne M Valente
#15. This is not a lie: Memory has the taste and texture of cooked meat. Eat it and live. Remember, but only what it is licit to remember.
In Aerograd, the word for meat and memory are the same.
Catherynne M Valente
#16. The Glasshobs built it to keep an eye on the stars, who have a tendency to run off on adventures and forget about how much we down-below folks need to navigate and cast horoscopes and meet lovers on balconies.
Catherynne M Valente
#17. Will you beat me if I say no?" he whispered fearfully.
September thought she might cry. "Oh ... oh dear. Not all the world is like that. Well. I am not like that.
Catherynne M Valente
#19. Endings are rubbish. No such thing. Never has been, never will be. There is only the place where you choose to stop talking. Everything else goes on forever.
Catherynne M Valente
#20. Hounds and hearthstones, girl, haven't you ever heard a story about Koschei? He's only got the one. Act one, Scene one: pretty girl. Act one, Scene two: pretty girl gone!
Catherynne M Valente
#21. Bosses run things. The rest of us get run. It's the only rank that matters these days. You can dress it up as baronies or boyars or caliphates, but that's just sticking lace and ribbons on the dinosaur and hoping he'll take you to town. Is you a boss or isn't you? That's about the size of it.
Catherynne M Valente
#22. September had only had coffee once, when her Aunt Margaret had snuck her a sip while her mother wasn't looking. It tasted bitter, but wild and strange. She rather wanted to taste it again.
Catherynne M Valente
#25. Fairyland is a very Scientifick place. We subscribe to all the best journals.
Catherynne M Valente
#26. I looked at this man and thought: Oh, how we are going to hurt each other.
Catherynne M Valente
#27. 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
#28. Life's still stupid but we got free of story out here under the beeches and the Big Dipper. We had enough of it, of things happening one after another and no end in sight. Of reversals and falling in love and tragic flaws, and by God if I see another motif in my business I will shoot it dead.
Catherynne M Valente
#29. You know how questing goes. You can't explain it to anyone else; it would be like telling them your dreams.
Catherynne M Valente
#30. I've always had enough, even if my enough and your enough are as different as an elephant and a minaret.
Catherynne M Valente
#32. Folk dress in all manner of finery and wonderful hats to go and watch the races, but only if it's horses doing the barreling that day. This, at least, is understandable, for horses, in secret, love hats more than any other creature. It is a horse's tragedy that they can never properly wear one.
Catherynne M Valente
#33. You can tell all that about me from your measuring tape?'
'Well, I use the metric system, It's the only way to get really exact numbers.
Catherynne M Valente
#34. These words were small and they only meant what they said, not how they felt before he said them. He nearly wept with the frustration of it.
Catherynne M Valente
#35. Husbands lie, Masha. I should know; I've eaten my share. That's lesson one. Lesson number two: among the topics about which a husband is most likely to lie are money, drink, black eyes, political affiliation, and women who squatted on his lap before and after your sweet self.
Catherynne M Valente
#36. It can only benefit the city to have endless waves of exceptionally capable, even brilliant, folk unfettered by class and family connections. They change the world once a generation. That is certainly worth something.
Catherynne M Valente
#37. In a city by the sea which was once called St. Petersburg, then Petrograd, then Leningrad, then, much later, St. Petersburg again, there stood a long, thin house on a long, thin street. By a long, thin window, a child in a pale blue dress and pale green slippers waited for a bird to marry her.
Catherynne M Valente
#38. I have tried to be a generous narrator and care for my girl as best I can. I cannot help that readers will always insist on adventures ...
Catherynne M Valente
#39. The kind of smile that has kept a froggy, dark sort of surprise in its back pocket, and won't spoil it too soon.
Catherynne M Valente
#40. She did not want Fairyland to be full of older girls who wanted to be stars.
Catherynne M Valente
#41. Yes," he growled, "yes, I will put you there and turn out the light in your eyes and come to stare at you for centuries, to pore over you, because you are mine, my treasure, my hoard, and I cannot keep you and I cannot let you go.
Catherynne M Valente
#42. Forests have secrets,' he said gently. 'It's practically what they're for. To hide things. To separate one world from another.
Catherynne M Valente
#43. Perhaps all a Tsaritsa is is a beautiful cold girl in the snow, looking down at someone wretched, and not yielding.
Catherynne M Valente
#44. The Heart of Fairyland is a story," she said, and she felt so warm and light and full of rightness of it that she thought she might faint.
Catherynne M Valente
#46. In my experience, folk find it nigh on impossible to call a thing what it is. It
Catherynne M Valente
#47. God is a random event, a nexus of pain and pleasure and making and breaking.
Catherynne M Valente
#48. We were just holes, after all, holes filled up with light, and deep in our secret hearts we worried that we were an accident,
Catherynne M Valente
#49. You can't have whatever you want. But to a child who must ask permission for every single thing, adulthood looks like a constant parade of every desire's satisfaction. It is a heady and terrifying place. It is the Otherworld. It is Fairyland. In fantasy, we make this literal.
Catherynne M Valente
#50. When I saw him I thought I could curl up inside him and go to sleep and never wake up." "Men are no good for that, Masha. They'll always want you working, when you're not softening their fall into bed at the end of the day.
Catherynne M Valente
#51. When I grew a little older, and had suitors, I demanded from them rings from the bottom of the sea, or a sword from the depths of the desert, or a golden bough and a thick golden fleece, too, before I allowed even one kiss.
Catherynne M Valente
#54. I can't stop," the shark rasped. "If I stop, I shall sink and die. That's the way I'm made. I have to keep going always, and even when I get where I'm going, I'll have to keep on. That's living.
Catherynne M Valente
#55. I ate all of my husbands. First I ate their love, then their will, then their despair, and then I made pies of their bodies - and those bodies were so dear to me!
Catherynne M Valente
#56. She is so stubborn, her heart has an argument with her head every time it wants to beat.
Catherynne M Valente
#58. 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
#59. Some thought he was quite wicked, but in truth, he was no more or less than any other crow: enamored of bright new things, and too clever to get them by the usual path.
Catherynne M Valente
#60. Cursing? Do you mean hunter?" It was her best guess, for Taiga had grimaced when she used it, as though the word hurt her to say. "Nope," said Taiga, kicking the dirt with one boot. "I mean wife.
Catherynne M Valente
#61. Greta, Greta, he whispered, eyes shut in rapture, on thy breast I write my Edda, at thy feet I lay the keys of Niflheim, by thy leave alone, I live, and breathe, and die.
Catherynne M Valente
#62. All Librarians are members of the Catalogue. That's what you call a coven when it's made up of Librarians instead of witches. Librarians have sorted and alphabetized all the magic that ever thought to put a rabbit and a hat together. Who do you think invented Special Collections?
Catherynne M Valente
#63. Did you see her?" the Marid said nervously, looking at her with great dark eyes. "Our daughter. Standing on the Gear. Dis you see her?"
"What?" said September - and then she winked out, like someone blowing out a candle, and all the field was still.
Catherynne M Valente
#64. The ghosts will eat everything because the bellies of ghosts want the whole world, just to fill one tiny corner.
Catherynne M Valente
#66. But the Tsar of Death and the Tsar of Life greatly feared one another, for Death is surrounded by souls, and is never lonely, and the Tsar of Life had hidden his death away in a place deeper than secrets, and more secret than depth.
Catherynne M Valente
#67. You will live as you live anywhere. With difficulty, and grief. Yes, you are dead. And I and my family and everyone, always, forever. All dead, like stones. But what does it matter? You still have to go to work in the morning. You still have to live.
Catherynne M Valente
#68. if enough lost things band together, even in the darkest depths, they aren't really lost at all anymore.
Catherynne M Valente
#69. 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
#70. She drank like a Czar and sang like a broken squeezebox and danced like the Sugarplum Fairy cutting loose at last
Catherynne M Valente
#71. The worst thing in the world is having to go back to the dark you shook off.
Catherynne M Valente
#72. It is harder, usually, to find a person who wants to walk the streets of me, to taste the teas of my country, to ... immigrate, you could say.
Catherynne M Valente
#73. Memory is like that. It alters itself so that girls
are always trapped under the earth, waiting in the dark.
Catherynne M Valente
#75. I didn't want to do my mathematics homework back home. Or mend the fence or mind the chickens. But I did it anyway. Just because a person doesn't want to do a thing doesn't mean they ought to shirk.
Catherynne M Valente
#76. 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
#77. The colours of the glass throw blue and green onto her wet cheeks. The sea wind picks up her hair violet electrics snap and sparkle between the strands.
Catherynne M Valente
#78. Stories have a way of changing faces. They are unruly things, undisciplined, given to delinquency and the throwing of erasers. This is why we must close them up into thick, solid books, so they cannot get out and cause trouble.
Catherynne M Valente
#79. A library is never complete. That's the joy of it. We are always seeking one more book to add to our collection.
Catherynne M Valente
#80. Shoes are funny beasts. You think they're just clothes, but really, they're alive. They want things. Fancy ones with gems want to go to balls, big boots want to go to work, slippers want to dance. Or sleep. Shoes make the path you're on. Change your shoes, change your path.
Catherynne M Valente
#81. She must have cried for some secret amphibian reason. Then her dress caught on fire while they danced, and there was a mess, but that's neither here nor there.
Catherynne M Valente
#82. She who invented words, and yet does not speak; she who brings dreams and visions, yet does not sleep; she who swallows the storm, yet knows nothing of rain or wind. I speak for her; I am her own.
Catherynne M Valente
#83. War must always be done out of sight, it shocks people and they stop immediately.
Catherynne M Valente
#85. A choice is like a jigsaw puzzle, darling troll. Your worries are the corner pieces, and your hopes are the edge pieces, and you, Hawthorn, dearest of boys, are the middle pieces, all funny-shaped and stubborn. But the picture, the picture was there all along, just waiting for you to get on with it.
Catherynne M Valente
#88. I'm not lost, because I haven't any idea where to go that I might get lost on the way to. I'd like to get lost, because then I'd know where I was going, you see.
Catherynne M Valente
#89. I will age for you, if it pleases you. I will match you, wrinkle for wrinkle, grey hair for grey hair, crease for crease, wrinkle for wrinkle. You will be so beautiful when you are old.
Catherynne M Valente
#91. All stories must end so, with the next tale winking out of the corners of the last pages, promising more, promising moonlight and dancing and revels, if only you will come back when spring comes again.
Catherynne M Valente
#92. The beauty Snow White's got has nothing to do with him. She's scarred up and suspicious and shameless. Her pretty's not for him. It's like saying the moon's got a fine figure on her. Maybe true, but what good is that to a man? Snow
Catherynne M Valente
#93. I readied myself for the great effort of speaking with the throat-and-belly instead of the mind-and-heart. It is altogether a different skill.
Catherynne M Valente
#95. I am not a little girl anymore, dazzled by your magic. It is my magic, now, too.
Catherynne M Valente
#97. I shall be as brave as a my Toad, he thought, for my Toad never hides under the bed when she is afraid of lightning or bats. She sticks out her tongue and eats them.
Catherynne M Valente
#98. Everything is always happening all at once, in the present tense, forever, the beginning and the end and the denouement and the remaindering.
Catherynne M Valente
#100. Funniest thing about love, how it shakes loose when no one's looking. How the dark helps it along. Maybe that's why we dug caves so much, way back when.
Catherynne M Valente
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