896 Quotes by Catherynne M. Valente

Goblins are well-rounded, though you’d never think it from the dastard tales folk tell of us. For example, I enjoy stamp collecting as well as haggling.

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.

You are not the chosen one, September. Fairyland did not choose you – you chose yourself.

One is always homesick for places where one came to grief.

A silent Library is a sad Library. A Library without patrons on whom to pile books and tales and knowing and magazines full of up-to-the-minute politickal fashions and atlases and plays in pentameter! A Library should be full of exclamations!

I will not let her speak because I love her, and when you love someone you do not make them tell war stories.

That’s how kings are made, my brush-tailed girl – they pick a place, shove a stick in it, call themselves King and wait to see if someone gets angry about it. No one has gotten angry so far, so that makes the otters mine.

Perhaps my philosophy is not so sophisticated. It goes: Come inside. I love you. A Whelk’s love will grow as big as it’s allowed.

She often felt that she chased the ideal cup of coffee in her mind from table to table, the rich, thick, creamy coffee, spicy, bittersweet, that betrayed no hint of thinness or chemical flavoring, nothing less than total, fathomless devotion to the state of being itself. Every morning she pulled a delicate cup from its brass hook and filled it, hoping that it would be dark and deep and secret as a forest, and each morning it cooled too fast, had too much milk, stained the cup, made her nervous.