American author (1979- )
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
And of course in stories there is always fate. It goes by the name of foreshadowing and it is the emperor of everybody.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance
I have no interest in writing a book about my abusive childhood or my awful marriage, stripped of the folklore and myth through which I saw those things even while they were happening. For me, those images are part of what happened, and part of what makes personal experience into stories that can touch others. It's more interesting to walk between the real world and the constructed world--and more, I don't really think there's much of a difference. Fiction is always fiction. It might as well have manticores in it as divorces.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
interview, Rain Taxi, November 21, 2013
Splendid things are often frightening. Sometimes, it's the fright that makes them splendid at all.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
A war story is a black space. On the one side is before and on the other side is after, and what is inside belongs only to the dead.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Deathless
The Moon cares nothing for our cute little troubles. She ate a thousand girls for lunch yesterday, and she was hungry again in an hour. She barely even looks at us.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance