Catherynne M. Valente Quotes

I never examined what I did in any great detail because I thought it would spoil things. I never read the scripts at all carefully, and never wanted to know what was going on, because I felt that being a benevolent alien that's the way it should be.

I think innocence is something that adults project upon children that's not really there.

No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child.

Credulity is the man’s weakness, but the child’s strength.

History sometimes makes fun of us and our best intentions.

Until I was about 13, somehow I managed to assume that everyone reacted to everything just about as I did. I took it for granted that everyone shared my passion for overcast skies. It came as quite a shock when I discovered that there were actually people who preferred sunshine.

It all sounds rather naive and sentimental to be talking about children laughing and dancing and singing together when we all know perfectly well that what children do in real life is snarl and take drugs.

When I found out that Santa Claus wasn't real, I wasn't upset; rather, I was relieved that there was a much simpler phenomenon to explain how so many children all over the world got presents on the same night! The story had been getting pretty complicated -- it was getting out of hand.

I think one of the reasons we have children is to believe everything all over again. And I'm not talking Santa, here, either.

A child is a person who can't understand why someone would give away a perfectly good kitten.

Young children have no sense of wonder. They bewilder well, but few things surprise them. All of it is new to young children, after all, and equally gratuitous.

Children seldom have a proper sense of their own tragedy, discounting and keeping hidden the true horrors of their short lives, humbly imagining real calamity to be some prestigious drama of the grown-up world.

Answered prayers are scary. They imply responsibility. You asked for it. Now that you've got it, what are you going to do? Why else the cautionary phrase Watch out for what you pray for; you might just get it?

There are 500 reasons I write for children.... Children read books, not reviews. They don't give a hoot about the critics.... They don't read to free themselves of guilt, to quench their thirst for rebellion, or to get rid of alienation. They still believe in God, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation, and other such obsolete stuff.... They don't expect their beloved writer to redeem humanity. Young as they are, they know that it is not in his power. Only the adults have such childish illusions.

If there be any thing a man might well pray against, that thing is the responsive gratification of some of the devoutest prayers of his youth.

Only children tell the whole truth, you know. That's what makes them children.

Everything is explicable in the terms of the behavior of a small child.

I'm sure I shall always feel like a child in the wood.

Come on back and we’ll see if you remember the simplest thing of all – how it is to be children, secure in belief and thus afraid of the dark.

There is this trouble about special providences namely, there is so often a doubt as to which party was intended to be the beneficiary. In the case of the children, the bears, and the prophet, the bears got more real satisfaction out of the episode than the prophet did, because they got the children.

I didn't trust adults because I thought they were all kind of corrupted. I thought children were pure and innocent, and that was inherently better. I guess I was a philosophical child.

So far as I have myself observed, the distinctive character of a child is to live always in the tangible present.

...if I have ever met someone without a single shadow on their heart, it was surely a child too young for speaking.

It is one of the ironies of history that reformers so often misjudge the consequences of their reforms.

Be careful what you wish for. There's always a catch.