Catherynne M. Valente Quotes: 16

• 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.

  The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

• I will not let her speak because I love her, and when you love someone, you do not make them tell war stories. A war story is a black space. On the one side is before and on the other side is after, and what is inside belongs only to the dead.

  Deathless

• For there are two kinds of forgiveness in the world: the one you practice because everything really is all right, and what went before is mended. The other kind of forgiveness you practice because someone needs desperately to be forgiven, or because you need just as badly to forgive them, for a heart can grab hold of old wounds and go sour as milk over them.

  The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There

• Do not ruin today with mourning tomorrow.

  The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

• 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.

  The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

• War is not for winning, Masha,"sighed Koschei, reading the tracks of supply lines, of pincer strategies, over her shoulder. "It is for surviving.

  Deathless

• Hats have power. Hats can change you into someone else.

  The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

• I have all the books I could need, and what more could I need than books?

  The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland - For a Little While

• Hearts set about finding other hearts the moment they are born, and between them, they weave nets so frightfully strong and tight that you end up bound forever in hopeless knots, even to the shadow of a beast you knew and loved long ago.

  The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There

• 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.

  The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There

• Men die. It's practically what they're for.

  Deathless

• Just remember that the only question in a house is who is to rule. The rest is only dancing around that, trying not to look it in the eye.

  Deathless

• Where there is a Key, there is yet hope.

  The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

• All things are strange which are worth knowing.

  In the Cities of Coin and Spice

• I wonder sometimes what the memory of God looks like. Is it a palace of infinite rooms, a chest of many jeweled objects, a long, lonely landscape where each tree recalls an eon, each pebble the life of a man? Where do I live, in the memory of God?

  The Habitation of the Blessed

• First, the avid student must be aware that when the world was young it knew only seven things: water, life and death, salt, night, birds and the length of an hour.

  Deathless