Quotes from Catherynne M. Valente

Remember, pain is not a test. Knowledge is not enough.

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.

Snow White swallows that like a sword. She lets the hammer click back into place. Everything in her that's not nailed down is shaking loose.

This was how it was done; you bare your belly to a great beast and endure trials and it all works itself out. There is a treasure or a sword. Or a woman. And that thing is yours not because you defeated anything, or because your flesh was hard and unyielding, but because you were worthy of it, worthy all along.

How we would like to argue with September, and tell her that in the waiting lies the pleasure! That we here in the world of sensible folk know how to wait without twisted-up bellies and tapping feet and wishing for the sun to hurry up and rise and set. That a clever person is never bored, and a bored person is never clever. But though I am sly, I am a trickster, I am even cruel—I cannot lie.

It is such hard work to keep your heart hidden! And worse, by the time you find it easy, it will be harder still to show it.

I won't be one of the hundreds telling you that being alive flows like a story you write consciously, deliberately, full of linear narrative, foreshadowing, repetition, motifs. The emotional beats come down where they should, last as long as they should, end where they should, and that should come from somewhere real and natural, not from the tyranny of the theatre, the utter hegemony of fiction.

It is important to announce your intentions at top volume, she thought, or your intentions will think you are ashamed of them.

Over in the refrigerated section hang lies told so long ago and so often that they turned into the truth and get taught in history books.

The body does the living; the shadow does the dreaming.

You are not the chosen one, September. Fairyland did not choose you – you chose yourself.

It is in the nature of winds to Snatch and Grasp at things, and Blow Them Away.

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

don't you dare judge me, it was four in the afternoon, and all cats know four in the afternoon is Twelfthnap, right after Teanap.

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?

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.

Time is communal, Marya Morevna, the most purely communal of all commodities. It belongs to us all equally.

everybody was terribly distracted by the seemingly unending, white-hot, existential, logistical, mostly mundane troubles of their own day-to-day lives.

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.

Jee haan, but they are the same! One hunts, one runs; one chews the carrot, one chews the Sir John Hurt. One makes eggs that go BANG! One makes Acme traps that go BANG! See? Sameful.

There is no end and no beginning. There is only we two, alone in the dark, for always.

A body needs a good memento mori to flush out the humors.

No one's good just from being born any place.

Very juicy. Basted with vitamin C. I've got a feline mignon with your name on it, sweetheart.