All jobs are odd, or they would be games or naps or picnics.

— Catherynne M. Valente

All Librarians are Secret Masters of Severe Magic. Goes with the territory.

— Catherynne M. Valente

All money is imaginary," answered the Cicatrix simply. "Money is magic everyone agrees to pretend is not magic. Observe! You treat it like magic, wield it like magic, fear it like magic! Why should a body with more small circles of copper or silver or gold than anyone else have an easy life full of treats every day and sleeping in and other people bowing down? The little circles can't get up and fight a battle or make a supper so splendid you get full just by looking at it or build a house of a thousand gables. They can do those things because everyone agrees to give them power. If everyone agreed to stop giving power to pretty metals and started giving it to thumbnails or mushroom caps or roof shingles or first kisses or tears or hours or puffin feathers, those little circles would just lay there tarnishing in the rain and not making anyone bow their noses down to the ground or stick them up in the air.

— Catherynne M. Valente

All things are strange which are worth knowing.

— Catherynne M. Valente

All time is mean young man. It takes and does not give, it rushes when you wish it would linger and drags when your wish is would fly. It flows sullenly, only in one direction, when it might take a thousand turns. You cannot get anything back once time has taken it. Time cheats and steals and lies and kills. If anyone could arrest it, they would have time behind bars faster than you can check your watch.

— Catherynne M. Valente

And as we watched, the Tsar of Death lifted his eyelids like skirts and began to dance in the streets of Leningrad.

— Catherynne M. Valente

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

And in her long nights, in her long house of smoke and miller's stones, she baked the bread we eat in dreams, strangest loaves, her pies full of anguish and days long dead, her fairy-haunted gingerbread, her cakes wet with tears.

— Catherynne M. Valente

And that is the last lesson of childhood: You spend all your years fighting against the injustice of big folk and their big rules until you are ready to rule yourself.

— Catherynne M. Valente

And the answer is: You are wrong. The Faeries are not gone. But they are no longer what they were. I watched it and did not help them, though I could have. I cheered. Furthermore, I cheered and I wept and I was glad. Perhaps I should not have been. Perhaps laughing at agony is a Fairy's game and I should not have moved my pieces on their board.

— Catherynne M. Valente