American author (1979- )
There is no such thing as a people who are all wicked or even all good. Everyone chooses. But even they, even they looked at people and saw only tools. No one is a cup for another to drink from.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
It's saying no. That's your first hint that something's alive. It says no. That's how you know a baby is starting to turn into a person. They run around saying no all day, throwing their aliveness at everything to see what it'll stick to. You can't say no if you don't have desires and opinions and wants of your own. You wouldn't even want to. No is the heart of thinking.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
Everything is prologue. Every story has a stutter. It just keeps starting and starting until you decide to shut the camera off.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance
It's very natural and very unsettling and sinister that the human tendency is to look at something that they can't categorize and slap a name that they're completely familiar with on it so that they don't feel quite so uncanny about it.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
interview, Electric Lit, December 1, 2015
If you want to know about the beginning of things, you have to talk to the dead.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance
A marriage is a private thing. It has its own wild laws, and secret histories, and savage acts, and what passes between married people is incomprehensible to outsiders. We look terrible to you, and severe, and you see our blood flying, but what we carry between us is hard-won, and we made it just as we wished it to be, just the color, just the shape.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Deathless
A tale may have exactly three beginnings: one for the audience, one for the artist, and one for the poor bastard who has to live in it.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance
That's what happens to friends, eventually. They leave you. It's practically what they're for.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
This is what it means to be a woman in this world. Every step is a bargain with pain. Make your black deals in the black wood and decide what you'll trade for power. For the opposite of weakness, which is not strength but hardness. I am a trap, but so is everything. Pick your price. I am a huckster with a hand in your pocket. I am freedom and I will eat your heart.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Six-Gun Snow White
I looked at this man and thought: Oh, how we are going to hurt each other.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
The Orphan's Tales: In the Cities of Coin and Spice
Longing for the fantastic is a human constant, I think.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
interview, Electric Lit, December 1, 2015
Do not ruin today with mourning tomorrow.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
What is the world but a boxing ring where fools and devils put up their fists?
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Deathless
A library is never complete. That's the joy of it. We are always seeking one more book to add to our collection.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
The Fairyland Series
Any story is a lie cunningly told to hide the real world from the poor bastards who live in it.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance
This is how you learn to see: You put together a crew. No one can see a damn thing clearly with only two eyes.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance
But lost children always find each other, in the dark, in the cold. It is as though they are magnetized, and can only attract their like.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
The Fairyland Series
Secrets seem so important until there's no one left to spill them to.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance
When the world changes, it stashes us away where we can't make it run the other way again.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
An ending means there is order in the universe, there is a purpose to events. There is a reason to do things, an answer to be found, a solution key at the back of the book that maps to the problems posed. Find one ending, a real ending, and the universe is redeemed, ransomed from death--but death can never be that ending. It is a cheat, a quick shock, but no story truly ends with death. A death only begs more questions, more tales.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance