American author (1979- )
Hope is a pickpocket with both fists full.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance
You humans, you know, whoever built you sewed irony into your sinews.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Deathless
Any father Christmas worth his holly holds something back for next year.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance
It is a terrible magic in this world to ask for exactly the thing you want. Not least because to know exactly the thing you want and look it in the eye is a long, long labor.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
For grace may only be found briefly, and always in the midst of madness.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Palimpsest
Death is not a checkmate ... it is more like a carnival trick. You cannot win, no matter how you move your Queen.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
Humans do not proceed in an orderly fashion from one scene to the next. Memory lies underneath happenstance; hope and dread sprawls on top. Our days and nights are their endless orgies.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance
Marriage is a wrestling match where you hold on tight while your mate changes into a hundred different things. The trick is that you're changing into a hundred other things, but you can't let go. You can only try to match up and never turn into a wolf while he's a rabbit, or a mouse while he's still busy being an owl, a brawny black bull while he's a little blue crab scuttling for shelter. It's harder than it sounds.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
The Fairyland Series
Who knows, maybe death is the darkroom where you get to see it all like it was supposed to come out. Bright and crisp and clean.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance
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
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
To touch a person ... to sleep with a person ... is to become a pioneer ... a frontiersman at the edge of their private world, the strange, incomprehensible world of their interior, filled with customs you could never imitate, a language which sounds like your own but is really totally foreign, knowable only to them.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Palimpsest
Temptation likes best those who think they have a natural immunity, for it may laugh all the harder when they succumb.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland
Trouble is, most times, when you go looking to sell your soul, nobody's buying.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance
In both marriage and war you must cut up the things people say like a cake and eat only what you can stomach.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Deathless
You will always fall in love, and it will always be like having your throat cut, just that fast.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Deathless
Mug your destiny in an alley and punch it until it gives you what you want.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance
If one did not have at least a little luck, one would never survive childhood. But luck can be spent, like money; and lost, like a memory; and wasted, like a life.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
I have ADD, I get bored very easily. I never want to do the same thing twice. It nearly kills me to write a series, because I always want to change things up. I was talking to my husband the other day about the new book I'm writing, I'm like, oh I could just do a straightforward book, I don't have to reinvent the wheel, and he was saying yeah totally. A few days later, I was kind of moping around, he said, you're mad because you're not reinventing the wheel aren't you. You don't want to pick up a dirty old wheel. I'm like, yes! I am most excited when I'm experimenting with something new, when I'm doing something that is out of the box for me.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
interview, The Fantasy Hive, September 17, 2019
You take sides if you're smart. Offer up your loyalty, 'cause it's all you've got to trade.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance
Even a corpse can be ruined. And a corpse's reputation doesn't mend.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance