You can't trust just any old person who comes along with a hundred puffins and a pretty face!

— Catherynne M. Valente

You get the face you build your whole life, with work and loving and grieving and laughing and frowning.

— Catherynne M. Valente

You haven't met your Way yet. It hasn't so much as kissed your hand! You haven't even at the door of the hall where your Way dances. But look here, look see, I've got them, I've caught them up just for you, a big bouquet of anywhere you want to go. Just pick a bloom, my girl, hold it to your pretty nose.

— Catherynne M. Valente

You have to have the right sort of stone. Period for mothers, girasole for lovers, sapphire for sadness, and garnet for joy.

— Catherynne M. Valente

You'll forgive the flowery talk, won't you? Our family does so love to be told they are beautiful. Vanity is an old and venerable habit.

— Catherynne M. Valente

You only had to choose which me to talk to, for, you know, we all change our manners, depending on who has come to chat. One doesn’t behave at all the same way to a grandfather as to a bosom friend, to a professor as to a curious niece.

— Catherynne M. Valente

You poor girl, what sort of aged, unfriendly Libraries have you met in short life? A silent Library is a sad Library ... A Library should be full of exclamations! ... A Library should be full of now-just-a-minutes and that-can't-be-rights and scientific folk running shelter to prove somebody wrong... A Library should not shush ; it should roar !

— Catherynne M. Valente

Your Eve was wise, John. She knew that Paradise would make her mad, if she were to live forever with Adam and know no other thing but strawberries and tigers and rivers of milk. She knew they would tire of these things, and each other. They would grow to hate every fruit, every stone, every creature they touched. Yet where could they go to find any new thing? It takes strength to live in Paradise and not collapse under the weight of it. It is every day a trial. And so Eve gave her lover the gift of time, time to the timeless, so that they could grasp at happiness.... And this is what Queen Air gave to us, her apple in the garden, her wisdom--without which we might all have leapt into the Rival in a century. The rite bears her name still. For she knew the alchemy of demarcation far better than any clock, and decreed that every third century husbands and wives should separate, customs should shift and parchments become architects, architects farmers of geese and monkeys, Kings should become fishermen, and fishermen become players of scenes. Mothers and fathers should leave their children and go forth to get other sons and daughters, or to get none if that was their wish. On the roads of Penelope folk might meet who were once famous lovers, or a mother and child of uncommon devotion--and they would laugh, and remember, but call each other by new names, and begin again as friends, or sisters, or lovers, or enemies. And some time hence all things would be tossed up into the air once more and land in some other pattern. If not for this, how fastened, how frozen we would be, bound to one self, forever a mother, forever a child. We anticipate this refurbishing of the world like children at a holiday. We never know what we will be, who we will love in our new, brave life, how deeply we will wish and yearn and hope for who knows what impossible thing! Well, we anticipate it. There is fear too, and grief. There is shaking, and a worry deep in the bone. Only the Nokia remains herself for all time--that is her sacrifice for us. There is sadness in all this, of course--and poets with long elegant noses have sung ballads full of tears that break at one blow the hearts of a flock of passing crows! But even the most ardent lover or doting father has only two hundred years to wait until he may try again at the wheel of the world, and perhaps the wheel will return his wife or his son to him. Perhaps not. Wheels, and worlds, are cruel. Time to the timeless, apples to those who live without hunger. There is nothing so sweet and so bitter, nothing so fine and so sharp.

— Catherynne M. Valente

Your past's a private matter, sweetheart. You just keep it locked up in Xbox where it can't hurt anyone.

— Catherynne M. Valente

You should always listen to Minotaur. Anybody with four stomachs has to have a firm grip on reality.

— Catherynne M. Valente