American author (1979- )
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
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
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
Love takes so much effort. You have to get up ever so early in the morning to really love someone properly.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance
Magic does that. It wastes you away. Once it grips you by the ear, the real world gets quieter and quieter, until you can hardly hear it at all.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Deathless
But a death is a death. It's a thing you can't get around. It just sits there like a fat arsehole in black pyjamas, eats all your food, drinks all your wine, and demands you call it mister for the privilege.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance
Husbands lie, Masha. I should know; I've eaten my share.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Deathless
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
The worst thing in the world is having to go back to the dark you shook off.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Six-Gun Snow White
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
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
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
I don't deal in unvarnished truths. It's the varnish that counts. That makes it true.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance
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
It's the wonders I'm after, even if I have to bleed for them.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
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
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
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 is harder, usually, to find a person who wants to walk the streets of me, to taste the teas of my country, to ... immigrate, you could say.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Palimpsest
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