American author (1979- )
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.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
The Fairyland Series
Even if you've taken off every stitch of clothing, you still have your secrets, your history, your true name. It's hard to be really naked. You have to work hard at it. Just getting into a bath isn't being naked, not really. It's just showing skin.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
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.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Deathless
The worst thing in the world is having to go back to the dark you shook off.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Six-Gun Snow White
I grew up reading science fiction and Fantasy and horror, so in my mind they're not that separate, and also, my degree's in classics. When I was first starting out, the notion that magic and monsters and witches and curses and blood debt and kings and queens and all that was not strictly speaking realism was crazy. In classics that's just Tuesday, that is the stuff of normal literature, that is not in any sense Fantasy; and if you are a classicist yourself, or read a lot into the Greek corpus, you'll find plenty of science fiction in there as well.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
interview, The Fantasy Hive, September 17, 2019
We all live inside the terrible engine of authority, and it grinds and shrieks and burns so that no one will say: lines on maps are silly.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
You should always listen to minotaurs. Anybody with four stomachs has to have a firm grip on reality.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
Husbands lie, Masha. I should know; I've eaten my share.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Deathless
A woman has but eight roles open to her: ingénue, mother, witch, detective, nun, whore, queen, and corpse.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance
You have no pride. If you have it, misplace it. Under your mattress, in someone else's cupboard. It'll do you no favours.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance
I don't deal in unvarnished truths. It's the varnish that counts. That makes it true.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance
Everything in creation is just a trick of the light--the only difference between heaven and hell is who's running those lights, who's got the switch, who knows the cues.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance
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.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
The Fairyland Series
When one is traveling, everything looks brighter and lovelier. That does not mean it IS brighter and lovelier; it just means that sweet, kindly home suffers in comparison to tarted-up foreign places with all their jewels on.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
All the rest of the nonsense a story requires is just a long seduction of the ending. You throw out murders and reversals and heroes and detectives and spies, juggle love affairs and near escapes and standoffs with marvellous guns, kidnappings and sorcery and comic relief and gravediggers and princesses and albino dragons, and it's all just to lure an ending into your bed.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance
But your own dreams always seem so special, so terribly yours, until you grow up and figure out they're just like everyone else's.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance
It's occasionally refreshing to simply sit with someone who has known you a long while and still thinks you're worth a damn.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance
Most novels, for me, start with a flicker of images, almost like a movie: a girl shivering in a garden, a map on a woman's skin, a long black car with chicken legs.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
interview, Rain Taxi, November 21, 2013
Well, I started out as a poet with no interest in writing fiction at all. Everything I ever learned about writing until after my first novel was published was all in the realm of poetry. So they're very mixed up for me, and I've been accused of passing off poetry as fiction for awhile now.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
interview, Rain Taxi, November 21, 2013
Temperament, you'll find, is highly dependent on time of day, weather, frequency of naps, and whether one has had enough to eat.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
The Fairyland Series